Porting

In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created for a computing environment that is different from the one for which it was originally designed (e.g. different CPU, operating system, or third party library).

Description

The term is also used when software/hardware is changed to make them usable in different environments.

Software is portable when the cost of porting it to a new platform is less than the cost of writing it from scratch.

The lower the cost of porting software, relative to its implementation cost, the more portable it is said to be.