Developing Portable Software69
It is actually misleading to speak of
porting the compiler the
essential requirement is to retarget the compiler. The compiler’s back end must be modified to generate code for the new machine. Many compilers are designed to make this type of adaptation relatively easy.
The retargeted compiler may also be ported to the new environment, but it does not actually matter on which system it runs.
In some cases the compiler
is a commercial product, not designed to allow adaptation by its users. In this case we must rely on the vendor to do the retargeting, or else this strategy is unavailable.
Many open source compilers, such as the GNU compilers, are designed for easy retargeting.
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