MPRESS vs papaw

MPRESS is an executable packer for compressing programs and libraries on Windows and macOS. It supports PE32, PE32+,.NET, and MAC-DARWIN executable formats, using the LZMAT compression library with optional LZMA compression. It can compress code, data, and resources, and strip relocation, debug information, exceptions, and other information. For.NET executables it supports Framework targets 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 without requiring the.NET Framework to be installed. A command-line interface can be used from batch files or make files. The README describes in-place decompression and says it has no memory overhead or other drawbacks; it also says compressed programs run without runtime performance penalties and may start faster from slow removable media or a network. MPRESS's compatibility list names Windows 9x, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, and Windows 8, along with mac-darwin-i386, mac-darwin-x86_64, mac-darwin-ub, and Mac OS 10.3 and 10.4. The listed plan costs nothing.

papaw is a Linux executable packer for programs that include statically linked third-party components, aimed at devices with limited disk space. It compresses executables and bundles them with a decompressor of about 15–40 KB. Supported algorithms are LZMA2, LZMA1, Zstandard and Deflate, and packed executables can replace themselves on disk when run. The project is free and unencumbered software under the MIT license, and can be self-hosted. It uses Meson and can be included as a Meson subproject; the README recommends `custom_target()` for running `papawify`. Prebuilt static binaries are available through GitHub releases, with example assets for aarch64, arm, armeb, i386, mips, mipsel and x86_64. To support portability, the project avoids machine-specific assembly and newer system calls such as `fexecve()`. Optional very basic anti-debugging protection is intended to discourage trivial reverse-engineering techniques. The payload is extracted to a temporary file; when run as root, papaw mounts a tmpfs filesystem and lazily unmounts it before extraction.