Linked by Radio on Fri 1st Feb 2013 22:57 UTC
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I may be mistaken, but even if XCOFF was developed by IBM for AIX, I think it is a binary executable format that is to some extent compatible with PowerPC based hardware, such as Powermacs. And Mach-O became standard on OS X because it is inherited from NeXT, and was ultimately developed (along with the Mach microkernel) at Carnegie Mellon University.
I'm not sure I understand your intent in saying that. (As phrased, it feels like a bit of a non sequitur)
Yes, XCOFF is PPC compatible. According to the Wikipedia page, it was used by early versions of PPC MacOS and BeOS.
It's an interesting bit of history, but it doesn't really say anything good about the format since BeOS apparently switched to PE in r3 and then to ELF in r4 and beyond and, as far as I can tell, Apple invented PEF before switching to Mach-O for OSX.
As for Mach-O, definitely an interesting bit of history (I never thought to look up what NeXT used) but not really a persuasive statement.
Mach-O has a 256-entry limit on arbitrary sections that ELF doesn't and ELF has a proposed extension for fat binaries that would probably be standard by now if any OS that used ELF saw it as more than just a way to waste disk space to make up for lack of a package manager.
Edited 2013-02-02 18:46 UTC




Member since:
2009-02-02
I may be mistaken, but even if XCOFF was developed by IBM for AIX, I think it is a binary executable format that is to some extent compatible with PowerPC based hardware, such as Powermacs. And Mach-O became standard on OS X because it is inherited from NeXT, and was ultimately developed (along with the Mach microkernel) at Carnegie Mellon University.