Platform Independence In Dynamic Languages

In today's modern computing world, more and more applications are built in dynamic languages. These languages offer more platform independence than compiled languages do. This is because dynamic languages run inside a virtual machine that was compiled for the target platform. The end result is applications that offer more platform independence. Dynamic language virtual machines are becoming more prevalent on end-user systems these days. For instance you'll find a Java virtual machine just about everywhere. In cases where the virtual machine does not exist on the target platform, the virtual machine can be distributed along with the application. The main benefit of course is that once a dynamic language virtual machine is installed, the machine handles the majority of the platform dependent operations.

There are obvious limits to how independent a given application written in a dynamic language can be. This mostly depends on what the application does. Applications that use only the most fundamental features of the language have any chance of being truly platform independent. Realistically, a given application is going to want to take advantage of libraries or modules offered by the language in order to provide better functionality. For instance, most dynamic languages will provide a operating system module for low-level system operations. Not all functionality of this module will be supported on all platforms and there may be subtle behavioral differences in the operations supported across all platforms. It is the responsibility of the application to handle these scenarios.

The best way to handle these platform dependent anomalies is to define platform specific abstractions. This abstraction is illustrated below.



The base Controller class is abstract. It should never be instantiated. Only one of its children, WinController or LinuxController, should ever be instantiated. Therefore, the base and its children should only define functionality that differs among supported platforms.