AI Weekly Malaysia

Farid Zakaria presents SELF (Structured Executable & Linkable Format), a working prototype where the executable file itself is a SQLite 3.x database that you can chmod +x and run. The core argument is that ELF already reinvents database primitives by hand—string interning, indexes, foreign keys, record layouts—and replacing them with SQLite would eliminate redundant parser/serializer implementations across the kernel, ld.so, binutils, readelf, and libraries like LIEF and goblin.

Why: This is a research prototype, not something to adopt, but it reframes how you think about binary formats: ELF's .strtab is string interning, .gnu.hash is an index, section headers are a schema table. If you ever parse or manipulate ELF files, the SQL-based approach (e.g., SELECT soname FROM ldd) is a concrete alternative worth experimenting with via the sqlelf tool on GitHub.