Machine-independent

Encyclopedia : M : MA : MAC : Machine-independent

In Computer science, a machine-independent program is any program that can be run by any computer, without regard to its architecture or operating system.

Any well-written Java or .NET application could be machine-independent because these platforms run on virtual machines on top of the real computer. The real machine-dependent part is the virtual machine, so this is the (usually little compared to the class libraries) chunk of code that needs to be ported.

To be machine-independent, the application also must not use any machine or platform-specific resources available. Examples of platform specific features are .NET P/Invoke and Java Native Interface, both of which allow the direct use of native libraries.

This is an example of a machine-independent C# application: it would open ".\data.xml" in Microsoft Windows and "./data.xml" in Linux (it also prints the resulting path).

using System;
using System.IO;

namespace Test
", filePath);
using(Stream fileData = File.Open())

}
}
}

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