Performance of Windows NT porting environments

Abstract

A cost effective method for developing complex software systems while managing reliability issues is to port existing applications to new platforms. A number of software products provide development and operational environments to facilitate the porting of UNIX applications to Windows NT. The goal of these products is to minimize the amount of code rewriting for the ported application. To this end these porting tools allow the recompilation of the UNIX code in a UNIX-like development environment on the Windows NT platform. Finally, they provide the necessary UNIX-like system calls to allow execution of the ported applications on Windows NT. We have conducted a series of tests to measure the performance of some standard UNIX applications when operated in conjunction with the different UNIX compatibility layers. For comparison we also executed the applications on the Win32 API, and performed tests with the applications running on Linux.