Question

I’m working on a paper about multi-platform programming and I’d like to include sections on advantages/disadvantages. From my understanding; having any application be multi-platform is a huge selling point for the developer since it enables almost any computer user as a potential buye, among other things. I’m just trying to figure out possible disadvantages. If any?

Answer 1

Generally on a multi-platform environment you will need an additional level of abstraction between the language and the machine such as an interpreter or the JVM. This additional level tells the specific machine how to run the code in its environment and brings more code that your computer has to run to handle a given set of instructions. Because of this, multi-platform applications are generally slower.

The logic behind this is instead of coding the same application many times for each environment, you create an interface of sorts for coders to program for. Each platform needs its own implementation of this interface but is intended to run code in a uniform way.

Also, while this layer is intended to provide universal behavior on multiple platforms you may still need to take into consideration differences in naming conventions and file storage from one platform to another.

Web browsers are the most widespread example of this. If you have a good browser, it interprets web standard code (HTML/CSS/JS etc) and takes care of how to display it on your particular platform instead of the code writer needing to accommodate for these differences.