Hello,

What option should I use while compile to make cross-platform (this is the name, I guess) program files for using in both Linux & Windows platforms? How complex is it?
For example, I use c++ Hello.cpp -o Hello to compile the Hello.cpp by gcc-c++ to run in Linux pc. How can I make it for both 'Linux & Windows'


Thanks.

You can't. You need to build it separately for each platform you want to support.

If cross-platform binary compatibility is a requirement, then you need something like Java.

Understood. Thanks.

I do Java programming too. Shall I make a new thread for this?

Actually, C++ definitely can be used to build cross-platform software, but most of the time you see this being done at a fairly low level, commensurate with say "the Linux kernel." The pragmatic problem that always comes up is the User Interface. There is no standardization on this.

Therefore, what you normally see being done is something like Java, which has "abstracted completely away" all of these environment-specific details and inserted a user-interface (GUI widgets, etc.) layer of its own devising ... which the language does undertake to support across a wide range of host platforms and environments. The host-specific language system itself works on bytecodes, not native machine instructions, and "compiled" programs are transportable among environments without recompilation. (Basically, the slight "overhead" is an acceptable and justifiable price to pay.)

All things considered, it's a strategy that works well in practice. (Java not of course being the only language-system that does it, nor that takes this general approach.)

Footnote: Some language-systems in this space are quite machine-specific. Microsoft's "C#" C-sharp compiler for dot-Net can be very expressive at a "bits and bytes" level if you want to be, and yet it all runs under the so-called "CLR" runtime environment.

I'm not sure if I understand what you're saying.

There are many good cross-platform user-interface libraries for C++. However, "cross-platform" in C++ means that you can compile the source on, or for, a selection of target platforms (one platform per compile). It doesn't mean that you can compile it once, and then run the same binaries on multiple platforms.

Low level or Kernel level programming. Obviously I'm not that expert yet. So, I guess its not for me yet.

Thanks all for explain in details.