Executable and Linkable Format

Definition: ELF is a common standard file format for executable files, object code, shared libraries, and core dumps. By design, the ELF format is flexible, extensible, and cross-platform. The reason it attracted my attention is due to its support for variety of Endianness.

Definition: Endianness is the order or sequence of bytes of a word of digital data in computer memory. It is primarily expressed as big-endian (BE) or little-endian (LE). A big-endian system stores the most significant byte of a word at the smallest memory address and the least significant byte at the largest. A little-endian system, in contrast, stores the least-significant byte at the smallest address. There are other types involving some mixture and so on and we won't delve into them here.