Comment by Gibbon1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gibbon1 | Hacker News Reader

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Lets consider #embed which is new for C23. It allows you to import binary blobs of data into a C program at compile time. Like say if you want to import an image or sound file or a table.

How hard was that to implement? Seriously no reason it couldn't have been part of C89. Why wasn't it? Because the compiler writers and the C++ standards committee have no personal use for it. It took 40 years of waiting and five years to get it just barely past the standards committee. If you think no one would strenuously oppose a feature like embed you'd be wrong.

Those guys also have no interest in printf type functions. And improving printf would be a lot more work than implementing #embed.

That’s neat - Borland C had the same thing with the `emit()` pseudo-function with their C89 compiler. I guess Borland’s compiler writers wanted it more than gcc’s?

You can use ld to turn any file into an object file:

    ld -r -b binary -o foo_txt.o foo.txt

foo_txt.o then has these symbols:

extern const char _binary_foo_txt_start[]; extern const char _binary_foo_txt_end[]; extern const void *_binary_foo_txt_size;

So you need to write your own declarations (it doesn't generate a header file).

_binary_foo_txt_size is weird and has to be used as: (size_t)&_binary_foo_txt_size

Or use (size_t)(_binary_foo_txt_end - _binary_foo_txt_start) instead.

Consider the difference between what a compiler does and say a video game or embedded firmware. Compilers are old school batch mode programs that import data from a file, parse it, transform it to something, and emit it as a file.

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