ELF – An extensive, lightweight, and flexible platform for game research | Hacker News Reader

ELF – An extensive, lightweight, and flexible platform for game research

code.facebook.com

61 pointsjimarcey14 comments

Are they dead set on the name? This isn't the first time Facebook has caused naming conflicts.

For those who don't know, ELF is the name of the format for Linux (and other OSs) executable files, and it's had that name for almost 30 years.

I was wondering if this had anything to do with the Linux format when I saw the name. Ungh.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one that was thinking this.

It's like Elm the framework or language or whatever it is. Every time I see it on HN I think "what, like the mail client?"

I don't love the name, but I'm curious if you forsee actual confusion or cases where it will cause real issues? There might be, but I'm having a hard time imagining any, given the completely different contexts for these two elves. When one's a platform and the other's a file format, I'd guess that most usage of the word "ELF" will reveal which one the speaker is talking about through context.

Many years of C++ dev in Linux, and I can't say I ever used "elf file" in a conversation, but it's worth pointing out that Linux created the naming conflict, not Facebook. The Linux ELF predates a short man dressed in green that works for Santa Claus by 130 years, and by the English usage of the word by about 300 years, and by the Norse mythology since the Middle Ages. ;)

My first thought on the name was "[E]xtensible [L]ightweight [F]lexible" fails to communicate anything meaningful to me - it doesn't hint that it's a platform for research or that it's for gaming. It's adorably hopeful about being extensible and lightweight and flexible, but I don't know what it's being compared to, and everyone's software starts extensible and lightweight and flexible, only time will let us know if they manage to keep the barnacles off that haunt all other software.

We handed new devs the ELF spec, the PE spec, and the MachO spec. But we were doing low level work that integrated our SDK into already built binaries.

I've run into problems in the past with namespaced classes not raising link errors for duplicate destructor definitions. That took us 2 weeks to track down.

In any case, at the moment it's mostly just causing confusion. It's a one-man project in FB Research, and he hasn't done any namespacing.

I see. Sometimes I lack imagination. He should do some namespacing. And all linkers should warn about duplicate destructor collisions. In this case, namespacing is the easier fix for sure. :P

Facebook just needs to bite the bullet and release a framework named Google

Or somebody needs to write a library to manipulate ELF binaries and call it facebook.

Googol, maybe.

I can't wait for the sequel framework, MACHO.

But the competing product "PE" is already superior!

Coding in a VR game-ified environment for work in 3, 2, 1...

...and now I feel an urge to read Snow Crash again.

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