Zig is now also a Windows resource compiler | Hacker News Reader

Zig is now also a Windows resource compiler

ryanliptak.com

55 pointsksec17 comments

I wish linux had a comparable system for systematically embedding assets in binaries.

There are GResources for the GTK/GObject ecosystem:

https://docs.gtk.org/gio/struct.Resource.html

With C23 and C++23, you can make use of #embedd for similar purposes.

Interesting, is #embed actually in C++23? From my gcc8 tomb I thought such delights were for the Chosen Few who write beautiful C23.

And me thinking having GCC 10 as default on cloud shells was already bad enough.

I was wrong on C++ side, apparently it is on track for C++26.

#Embed is in C23, std::embed is hopefully coming in C++26.

I stand corrected.

Win32 resources are much more than that. They have names and type information associated with them, and they can be multilingual (see e.g. [0]). A rich runtime API is provided to dynamically find and load resources from executables/libraries. You can distribute a resource library that other programs can statically link in or dynamically load. Basically, it’s an ABI for resources, including localization support and a schema for UI-related resource types.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winbase/...

You can embed assets into a binary with Go https://blog.jetbrains.com/go/2021/06/09/how-to-use-go-embed...

This feature of Go tool chain is so underrated. Yes, there is nothing magical here. I can achieve similar outcome with some custom preprocessing, but having it built into the ecosystem, with type checking and inferencing, single binary compilation, etc. is a great productivity booster.

You can use `objcopy`, `as`, or `ld`. There are several ways, some of which even allow setting the symbol size (which most people never care about, but sometimes matters for nerds introspecting your object files).

Embedding binary data should be part of the language/toolchain, not the operating system. For example, include_bytes!() in Rust.

This is embedding in the way the operating system can find it.

As long as you can open your own executable for reading what does the OS have to do with this?

Icons are the most common use case I'd think. But several other things that could be indexed, information about the application, etc...

Yeah but the original post was talking about "Linux" which doesn't really have any use for that on the kernel level. I also doubt Freedesktop are going to specify special ELF sections or something for icons.

Don't care if the kernel needs it or not. I care about the things for which Windows uses it. Why is the icon a separate file on Linux?

> I also doubt Freedesktop are going to specify special ELF sections or something for icons

They should. It would stop my icons from disappearing / changing on me while Iam not looking.

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