Apple macOS has for many years supported the ability to have binaries for multiple platforms in one executable. Upon execution the correct binary data is loaded into RAM. This has multiple names such as “Universal”, “fat binary” or “Multi-Architecture Binaries”. These were really useful when Apple was transition from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, a single binary would execute on both platforms. It could be useful in the future if, as many predict, Apple move from Intel to ARM CPUs.
In this post I’ll talk about the m4 script I wrote at HP to use this feature for combined 32bit and 64bit Intel binaries (back when that was relevant).
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