Comment by zahlman
13 hours ago
> It's pretty widely used, though often dressed up as something else. JAR files or APK files or whatever.
JAR files generally do/did use compression, though. I imagine you could forgo it, but I didn't see it being done. (But maybe that was specific to the J2ME world where it was more necessary?)
Specifically the benefit is for the native libraries within the file as you can map the library directly to memory instead of having to make a decompressed copy and then mapping that copy to memory.
Yes, that's clear. I'm just not aware of people actually doing that, or having done it back in the era when Java was more dominant.
The bigger issue is that glibc doesn't support loading libraries from zip archives where bionic's linker ddoes. So on platforms where glibc is used you wouldn't see it being done.
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