thrwawy283

I'm no great software engineer, but I'm curious if there are any strong opinions on which executable format is the best. Formats like PE or ELF or (a.out?) or others?

Typically if you run a particular operating system you're not going to see several types of executable formats. The question wouldn't come up.

There have to be others with odd advantages, like an executable format that lends itself toward streaming-in the parts of the binary you're executing (exec as you torrent, lol). Or perhaps 1 that stores different parts of itself in a SQL database (read-only, strings, debugging info, etc). Someone has to have created an executable format out of sqlite databases. I remember "Universal" binaries on Mac archived several architectures' binaries together.

In the interest of a discussion I haven't seen: What is the best executable format and why? What are some creative ones?