[kazinator]

Portable has two meanings: a construct is portable if we can rely on it to work everywhere. A portable codebase is one that supports moving to a new platform, with some nonzero effort which is not large compared to rewriting the code. It is able to be ported. E.g, "Johnson's Portable C Compiler (PCC)".

If only the Foo kernel must be rewritten in order to port Foo, but that kernel is 75% of Foo, then I would say Foo is not portable. If the kernel is 0.1% of Foo, then I would say that it is: 99.9% of the code base depends on the abstractions in the Foo kernel rather than platform features.

[hnlmorg]

> “Portable”, in the context of how it was used, generally refers to software using platform agnostic idioms.

“in the context of how it was used,”

This isn’t some meta conversation about how to write portable software. This is a conversation specific to what the author had written about their project.

[kazinator]

In context, they probably mean portable by installed base of targets. In a world in which nothing but ARM cores exist, a machine language ARM program is portable, and even "extremely" so.

There is a usage of "portable" which has to do with percentage of installations it runs in or can be easily made to run in, regardless of how much has to be changed to get it working anywhere else.

[hnlmorg]

You are using the term incorrectly.

As I said before:

> “Portable”, in the context of how it was used, generally refers to software using platform agnostic idioms.

Words have meanings. If the code is tied to an architecture then it isnt portable. And as you said, there’s nothing wrong with that. But arguing some other definition of a word people are already using is just stupid.