[zahlman]

> 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?)

[charcircuit]

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.

[zahlman]

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.

[charcircuit]

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.

[zahlman]

Again, I was talking about Java (not C). Good to know, though.