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Comment by mkotowski | Hacker News Reader

What are upsides of using this format instead of a more generic array of pixels (something like output of imagemagick to .h files or PPM files)?

BTW I know one can use resource files (.rc) on Windows to embed various resources, but is there an analogous mechanism for linux binaries?

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The examples in the wiki article show the difference pretty well. XPM lets you sort-of see what the image is just by looking at the source file.

E.G. compare this

  static char blarg_bits[] = {
  0x13, 0x00, 0x15, 0x00, 0x93, 0xcd, 0x55, 0xa5, 0x93, 0xc5, 0x00, 0x80,
  0x00, 0x60 };

with this

  static char * blarg_xpm[] = {
  "16 7 2 1",
  "* c #000000",
  ". c #ffffff",
  "**..*...........",
  "*.*.*...........",
  "**..*..**.**..**",
  "*.*.*.*.*.*..*.*",
  "**..*..**.*...**",
  "...............*",
  ".............**."
  };

On Linux you can use "ld -o myobj.o -r -b binary myfile.dat" and it will generate a linkable object file that contains your file data as a byte array. However, other platforms do it other ways, so it's generally easier to use "xxd" from the vim package to generate a C source file with a literal array, similar to the way that XPM works. That will work on all platforms.

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