Mach-O does more than ELF, and enables the two-layer namespacing that makes mac...

mike_hearn · 2026-09-01T09:30:10 1788255010

It's more that Darwin does. A fat binary is just two independent Mach-O binaries concatenated with a small header.

yjftsjthsd-h · 2026-09-01T18:10:40 1788286240

Maybe, but ELF doesn't support doing so

kevans91 · 2026-09-01T18:38:53 1788287933

One might be interested in the not-very-alive FatELF implementation, though: https://icculus.org/fatelf/

yjftsjthsd-h · 2026-09-01T20:31:42 1788294702

Yep, that sounds like the same idea:

> The format is very simple: it adds some accounting info at the start of the file, and then appends all the ELF binaries after it, adding padding for alignment. The end of the file isn't touched, so you can still do things like self-extracting .zip files for multiple architectures with FatELF.

But I would indeed call it very-not-alive; their demo image is Ubuntu 9.04