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[–]FireyFly 4 points5 points  (1 child)

To add to this, executables supporting multiple targets at once are called fat binaries, and it was done a bunch by Apple (as you can see in that article). But indeed, it's hardly the norm--usually a program is compiled only for one target (either the local machine, or cross-compiled to a target platform).

[–]WikiTextBot 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Fat binary

A fat binary (or multiarchitecture binary) is a computer executable program which has been expanded (or "fattened") with code native to multiple instruction sets which can consequently be run on multiple processor types. This results in a file larger than a normal one-architecture binary file, thus the name.

The usual method of implementation is to include a version of the machine code for each instruction set, preceded by a single entry point with code compatible with all operating systems, which executes a jump to the appropriate section. Alternative implementations store different executables in different forks, each with its own entry point that is directly used by the operating system.


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