The gist of the comment was whether GCC automatically made something like WebKit + JIT + Native Client work on very, different OS by a simple compile. I doubted that was true or that the work was easy.

You only need to implement the window system and widget rendering glue. The layout, javascript, CSS, DOM, history, etc is all platform independent.

But implementing `drawButton()`, `blitToScreen()` and similar is in no way similar to implementing a C++ compiler, as you implied.

An example of a port is here, in this directory: https://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/WebCore/platfor...

Sounds a lot better than I thought. Appreciate the explanation. :)

I ran firefox on BeOS.

Im curious how it ran. Was there a performance boost from BeOS architecture?

Not noticeably. It just rendered better than the built in browser..

I prefer clang.