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Comment by stillpointlab | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking that one could just write a loader that goes from SELF->ELF on load. You then pay the cost on startup. Probably not worth it for one-shot programs like ls/cat/etc, but for long running programs and daemons it might be workable.

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Another option is to adapt a database engine to support page-aligned blobs, which is probably not that hard to achieve.

Of course there are many options, but the benefit of the SQLite approach is the existing tooling, support, etc. Like others have said, one could just write a SQL interface over a set of virtual tables derived from the actual elf (if one just wanted a CRUD-like interface to a binary).

All of the benefits of SQLite disappear once one diverges from the format in any way. At which point it would be better to ask: "what is the best first-principles implementation of this idea?", instead of "what is the minimal change to SQLite to achieve this specific narrow goal?"

I might look at this next; with Nix it's easy to explore and rebuild seamlessly ;P

I didn't understand the core issue, is it that due to non-alignment of the on-disk data you have to do a copy at load time, but if you could guarantee alignment of the actual blob content then you could use it directly?

Exactly, a guaranteed alignment and continuity of a blob makes it memory-mappable allowing to avoid copying the data back and forth.

On a brief background read it looks like another issue is that blobs are not necessarily stored in contiguous regions of the file. Maybe there's some clever way to combine a VFS shim and virtual tables to store page aligned blobs in a region of the same file as the main database.

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