SOFTWARE PORTABILITY BASED ON RETARGETABLE RUNTIME ENVIRONMENT

Subject of Research. The paper presents research of approaches to portable software development at the level of binary and source code. We study such factors affecting portability as compatibility of target platforms at the level of software and binary application interfaces, standardization of programming languages, software architecture, the functionality of software target platforms and software tools. Modern approaches for software portability based on virtual runtimes for Java and the .NET platform are considered. Method. A method is proposed for software portability based on twostage compilation and an architecture description language application for translator configuration. The method gives the possibility to solve the software portability problem at the level of program execution environment. We also present a new approach to self-tuning runtime implementation with such configuration parameters as architecture-dependent metadata — descriptions of target platforms. To generate a binary image of the runtime environment for a target platform, its source code is not required. Image generation is performed based on metadata that is part of an existing image used as a builder utility. Main Results. Implementation requirements for the program execution environment and its architecture at the level of functional components are determined. The novel approach for the runtime implementation is proposed which ensures portability without recompilation from the source code of both user applications and the runtime environment. A script for the runtime environment application has been developed to generate its binary image aimed at a target platform. Practical Relevance. Binary portability of the program execution environment allows reducing labor costs for cross-platform applications.