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My company uses a product called VxWorks and I am looking for a software to help port the VxWorks application into Windows. Note that the motherboard was changed. The OS would be changed to Windows-7 embedded too. Now, the question is how to port the original VxWorks' application to Windows platform. I wonder if there are any tools to help to do such a job.

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  • Is your application compiled with Diab Compiler, GNU, Intel C++ Compiler? Are you OK with emulation or do you want native code?
    – Nicolas Raoul ♦
    Commented Jan 28, 2016 at 3:40
  • How big is the application, and what do your forsee as major problems during the migration if you do it by hand?
    – Ira Baxter
    Commented Jan 28, 2016 at 5:10
  • 1. In original project, the codes were compiled by Tornado (fm WindRiver). 2. There are two platforms: one has about 110K lines and the other has about 45K lines.
    – Stan Huang at Taiwan
    Commented Jan 28, 2016 at 10:22

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I came back to share my experience with it during the recent months. I found the GUI programs calling two libraries: Zinc & WindML. The former is higher level calling the latter. I got a trial version of OS Changer from MapuSoft and found that they don't support porting of Zinc/VxWorks to Zinc/Windows. Instead, I found there is another version of Zinc, Zinc for Windows. Since that, I can deal the portion of Zinc-based codes by just recompiling it using Zinc for Windows. What OS Changer can help is just WindML-based codes, which are just small portion since most codes calling Zinc library.

In the other hand, the reason why I purchase tools like Zinc for Windows or OS Changer is just for saving time. The quota for OS Changer is more than year income of an average Taiwanese SW engineer, but it can save only about 1 month engineering time, at most. So, what sense does it make to purchase it for a small project?

Instead, the price of Zinc for Windows is less than half month salary of Taiwanese SW engineer, but it can save several months engineering time and give better code quality.

So, I decided to purchase Zinc for Windows and port WindML-based codes by hand.

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    So how much time do you expect to use converting the application going down this path?
    – Ira Baxter
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 9:39
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    Two to three months.
    – Stan Huang at Taiwan
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 9:59
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I just found a software from MapuSoft: http://www.mapusoft.com/

Their products are mainly for helping porting applications among different platforms to secure your investment on SW development. I even had a meeting with its FAE and saw his simple presentation & demo. I got trial version. It's very likely this could be what I want. Using this tool, I don't need to port all codes line by line.

There are more benefit in using their tools compared to porting manually.

I'll come back here to confirm if it works well after I verify it. It'll be weeks later.

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  • I look forward to your post. If it works, don't forget to accept your own answer, as that will help otehrs who read this question in future.
    – Mawg
    Commented Jan 29, 2016 at 11:38
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    I didn't accept this solution from Mapusoft. It's too expensive. In Taiwan, porting a project like what I said may cost about less than US$40K, but it cost almost 1.5 of it and I still need to spend much time to it. It's not very high percentage to do the porting automatically.
    – Stan Huang at Taiwan
    Commented May 25, 2017 at 1:34
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After some trial, I don't appreciate that tool. It's not so fancy as they said. My solution is still to write the program in hand.

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