I have recently been working on a project where the target operating system is Windows XP. Since I do not have a Windows XP installation, I started writing code on Linux and since it worked fine in the beginning, I continued doing so throughout the development phase of the project. At a later stage when it was time to start testing and integrating on Windows I discovered one or two platform specific errors in the code, that I easily fixed.
The major benefit was that I could use free tools for validating the software, like Valgrind (with CallGrind enabled for profiling data), KCacheGrind and GProf that would have been hard, or even impossible in some situation if I had developed only on Windows XP.
Just for the fun of it, I tried to build it on Mac OS X 10.4 just to see if it worked – and it did! Right out of the box. That is another major benefit of multi platform development. The chances that it works right out of the box on a new platform is significantly higher than if only one target platform is used.
Since I now could build the code on three platforms without breaking a sweat, I added multiple targets to our automatic build system. That was simply to prevent that new code that would prevent the multi platform build qualities should be introduced into the system.
