Re:ELF files on Linux
by monocasa on Thursday May 16, 2019 @02:19PM
(#19931417)
Not haberman, but I've written loaders for both Mach-O and ELF, and really prefer ELF.
ELF is mainly structured like descriptive tables of how the relevant pieces look in memory; Mach-O is more structured like a script of commands that you run to load the binary. There's a couple places where the model breaks down for ELF, DWARF and GNU_STACK both feel more Mach-O, but if you're playing with binaries for non standard uses, ELF just feels a lot cleaner IMO.
I'd love to hear the Mach developer's arguments though.
ELF is mainly structured like descriptive tables of how the relevant pieces look in memory; Mach-O is more structured like a script of commands that you run to load the binary. There's a couple places where the model breaks down for ELF, DWARF and GNU_STACK both feel more Mach-O, but if you're playing with binaries for non standard uses, ELF just feels a lot cleaner IMO.
I'd love to hear the Mach developer's arguments though.