Editing GNU coding standards (section)

==Portability==

The GNU Coding Standards define the issue of portability in this way: portability in the [[Unix]] world means 'between Unixes'; in a GNU program this kind of portability is desirable, but not vitally important.

According to the standard, portability problems are very limited as GNU programs are designed to be compiled with one compiler, the [[GNU Compiler Collection|GNU C Compiler]], and only run on one system, which is the GNU system.

There is one form of portability problem though, and that is the fact that the standard makes it clear that a program should run on different [[Central processing unit|CPU]] types. The standard says that GNU doesn't and won't support 16-bit systems, but handling all the different 32- and 64-bit systems is absolutely necessary.