What is the point of padding?

Posted by ktm5124 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by ktm5124
Published on 2010-12-27T22:48:20Z Indexed on 2010/12/27 22:54 UTC
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In particular, I'm reading into the Mach-O binary file format for Intel 32 on OS X. After the FAT header there is a whole bunch of padding before the offset of the first archive. What is the point of all this padding?

To be more specific, there is upwards of 4000 bytes of padding between the FAT header and the first archive (in particular, the mach_header). Why include all these extra bytes?! Is OS X fond of adding 4 MB to all their universal binaries?

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