Ported

Ported is the past tense and past participle of the verb port. In general English usage, to port can mean to carry or transport something, or to bring a vessel into a harbor in nautical contexts. Outside technical fields, this sense of the word is relatively uncommon and often historical.

In computing, porting refers to adapting software so it can run on a platform different from the one for which it was originally developed. The process can involve translating source code or recompiling, replacing platform-specific APIs, and adjusting libraries, graphics, input methods, and file formats. Porting aims to achieve functional equivalence on the new system rather than exact code reuse, and it frequently requires handling architecture differences, such as processor endianness or word size, and varying available hardware features.

Ported software is described as a port, and it is a common outcome when developers release a game or application on additional platforms—for example, a desktop program ported to a mobile OS or a PC game ported to a console. The difficulty of porting varies with how closely the original relies on platform-specific technologies versus cross-platform libraries and abstractions.

Etymology traces the term back to Old French port and Latin porta, with the modern computing usage emerging from the broader sense of transferring software between environments. While “ported” can surface in other contexts, its dominant contemporary meaning appears in technology and software development, where it signals adaptation rather than a simple copy.