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What does “native binary” mean?

• michaericalribo 8y ago
  Compiled locally, so (posssibly) optimized for better performance than a generic binary compiled for your architecture.
• black-tea 8y ago
  Compilers like GCC can produce code specifically for your CPU such that it uses all of the special features you might have like SSE, AVX etc. When binaries are made for general use they have to be compiled with a generic feature set so might not make best use of your CPU.
  • ninkendo 8y ago
    So can a cross compiler, no?
    • black-tea 8y ago
      If you know the exact flags for your CPU then you can compile for it on any other CPU using a cross compiler line GCC, yes. But that doesn't help because in practice you'll just find one binary per architecture, not per CPU.