Sure, but COFF and its variations are much less practically common in Unixes (ie ignoring PE)
In any case, it’s highly doubtful being different from ELF is offering real value to anyone at this point, it’s just nobody wants to spend time, money, etc to migrate when incremental change to their own formats gets most of what they want.
Though it is probably accurate to say apple probably has it the worst here. Mach-O tooling is almost certainly the least available out of ELF, COFF, and Mach-O.
It'd make quite a few things so much easier if Apple just switched to ELF. At the cost of being a giant break :/
There are other UNIXes that aren't ELF, e.g. AIX.
Sure, but COFF and its variations are much less practically common in Unixes (ie ignoring PE)
In any case, it’s highly doubtful being different from ELF is offering real value to anyone at this point, it’s just nobody wants to spend time, money, etc to migrate when incremental change to their own formats gets most of what they want.
Though it is probably accurate to say apple probably has it the worst here. Mach-O tooling is almost certainly the least available out of ELF, COFF, and Mach-O.
I honestly think Mach-O is more elegant than ELF, with its structure of load commands.
Of course, ELF still wins by being more mainstream, and not being de facto under the control of a single vendor.
> I honestly think Mach-O is more elegant than ELF, with its structure of load commands.
Can you elaborate on that, especially contrasting with ELF's PT_LOAD program headers?
That's a true statement, but what's the argument?