@itix
To be clear, I never said ELF is a cause of huge bloat, just that it's less compact. Things that ELF binaries have that bloat them include:
1) As you mention, the headers are larger in ELF
2) Page-aligining .text, .data, .rodata, etc. That can add up to 12KB to an executable size, assuming worst case and 4KB page size (best case it adds nothing)
3) The Global Offset Table ELF uses to implement position independent code, which is normally only needed for shared libraries, but which is a requirement for all amiga binaries due to the single address space design of amigaos (doesn't the PPC instruction set allow native position independent code? I never understood why the ABI says you need a GOT when the architecture implements the feature natively)
Those are not going to add megs to an executable's size by any means, but if you have a couple hundred programs and libraries it does add up, and the original question was "why is this thing bigger?"
Last edited by CodeSmith on 23-Oct-2007 at 05:41 PM.
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