Farid Zakaria writes about SELF, a prototype that replaces the ELF executable format with a SQLite database, arguing that ELF is already a database that reimplements many primitives by hand (string interning, indexes, b-tree pages, foreign keys). The prototype stamps "SELF" in SQLite's application_id field, registers binfmt_misc to recognize the magic, and runs a small C interpreter that reads loadable segments from the database, maps them into memory, relocates, and jumps to the entry point. Dynamic linking works either through glibc's rtld-audit interface or a fully SQL-based loader called self-ld.
