4 ms·

I had a skim of the book posted here, and it looks very interesting, and it goes into a lot of detail, for example there is a page on the ELF format and how the

I had a skim of the book posted here, and it looks very interesting, and it goes into a lot of detail, for example there is a page on the ELF format and how the data is packaged. Are you saying you NEED to know all this to write useful code? I sort think you don't really, not at least since high level languages came out. That said this book looks very interesting to read for curiousity.

mgaunard 3y ago
Knowing how ELF works is certainly useful for many reasons, at least if you are building applications that compile down to ELF. You may want to know why they are the size that they are, be able to extract meta-information, configure how the dynamic linker works, extract debug info, etc. Some of things are actually critical for installation or deployment.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  That makes sense, but if I am purely developing for the web, and maybe nodejs on the back end, for say a JIRA clone, and I am on a team, would I need to know? Probably useful. And I am for curiosity. But I don't think it is worth making developers feel bad because they haven't jumped through a particular hoop, which I think some of the sentiment on this thread seemed like it was doing.