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Nitpicking on terminology. Portable used to mean that software can run on another platform with minimal modifications. Typically by relying on abstraction layers that then has multiple implementations. It's cool that a single executable can run on both Windows and some Unixes but that's something else than what portable used to mean.

portable = able to port

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Thanks for the clarification. So I learnt executable isn't the same as portable.

In this sense, we cannot say "C is portable"? Since we need to compile it for each platform; the same for java, we need to run the bytecode on each platform's virtual machine, and the compiler/virtual machine isn't built-in along with most os.

Then back to node.js, since v8/bun is not built-in on most os, so we cannot say it's portable right?

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