Isn't that somewhat possible with @embedFile? Then you get the content of the file as a null terminated byte array / normal zig string. I would think you could do further comptime things to it after that no? I haven't tried it myself so maybe I am missing something.

I get that this differs from normal file io, but I could argue that is in line with Zig motto of clarity.

Also you would of course suddenly have to have the file content as part of your binary. Maybe you were hoping to be able to throw that away after you generated what you wanted...?