Lars, I believe “is portable” has a slightly different and more accurate meaning in this case. The difference mostly comes down to intent.
If something “is portable”, it is designed that way from the beginning. For example, a “portable stereo” is of a very different design than a “home stereo” system. Software that “has been ported” may never have been intended to run on the systems and architectures it now runs on. For example, parts of one of the commercial products I work on were originally written for IBM CP/67 and were eventually ported to younger dinosaurs like SunOS, Ultrix, and OSF/1 and later still, IBM AIX and Solaris. Along the way it was “ported to” various UIs including text terminals, X/Motif, and HTML. It “has been ported” to GNU/Linux about 13-14 years ago. Note that, it would be nearly as much work (or even more) to get it to run on one of those older systems again - porting it in each case meant adapting it to its new environments and making it fit in as well as possible there, and in some cases cutting out, discarding, and replacing the parts that didn’t fit. I think in GNUStep’s case, the intent is clearly to support application code meant to be “portable” to many environments. —Robert > On Nov 11, 2024, at 05:46, [email protected] wrote: > > Hi Riccardo (and all other GNUsteppers), > > > On https://www.gnustep.org/ it says on the top: > > A Framework suited for development of advanced GUI desktop applications or > server applications. It closely follows Apple's Cocoa APIs and is portable to > a variety of platforms and architectures. > > Nitpick: wouldn’t it be better if it said „has been ported“ instead of „is > portable“? > > > Kind regards, > > Lars
