Overview of Cross-Platform Issues

IDL is designed as a platform-independent environment for data analysis and programming. Because of this, the vast majority of IDL's routines operate the same way no matter what type of computer system you are using. IDL's cross-platform development environment makes it easy to develop an application on one type of system for use on any system IDL supports.

Despite IDL's cross-platform nature, there are differences between the computers that make up a multi-platform environment. Operating systems supply resources in different ways. While IDL attempts to abstract these differences and provide a common environment for all Windows and UNIX machines, there are some cases where the discrepancies cannot be overcome. This chapter discusses aspects of IDL that you may wish to consider when developing an application that will run on multiple types of computer.

Note
This chapter is not an exhaustive list of differences between versions of IDL for different platforms. Rather, it covers issues you may encounter when writing cross-platform applications in IDL.