Recompiling Code

One of the greatest strengths of Linux is that it can run almost any UNIX program. But many UNIX machines don't use the Intel (or Digital Alpha) processors. What's more, when UNIX was designed, binary emulation of different machine architectures was prohibitive in terms of hardware requirements and was unworkable in business environments in which UNIX was deployed. Nonetheless, UNIX systems are, for the most part, source-code compatible, so a program's source code (typically in C) can be recompiled on a different platform and will usually work. Of course, this is not guaranteed, so sometimes minor changes are required.

Even DOS and Windows programmers have reason to thank UNIX systems: The standard C libraries are part of the ...

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