Re: C23 thoughts and opinions

On 27/05/2024 01:44, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Sun, 26 May 2024 13:09:36 +0200, David Brown wrote:
 

People have always managed to embed
binary source files into their binary output files - using linker
tricks, or using xxd or other tools (common or specialised) to turn
binary files into initialisers for constant arrays (or structs).

 Don’t call them “tricks”. Call them “linker scripts” and “build
procedures”. They can do some quite complex things.
 

#embed has two purposes.  One is to save you from using external tools
for that kind of thing.

 But it can only be a partial solution to that. It cannot replace the
procedures needed to construct the binary data format.

The binary data already exists, or has been created.
The problem is getting it into your program as ready-to-use data rather than have to bundle an unwieldy collection of files in a folder somewhere and then have assorted routines to read them into memory.

It only solves the
easy part: including that binary data in the build.

Apparently that is not so easy as you seem to think. Or maybe you think that 'embedding a file' just means adding it to a zip file?

That’s why I think it’s a waste of time.

Embedding applies also to text files not just binaries.
I used that extensively so that I could build in the sources of the C standard libraries into my C compiler. The result is a single executable with zero dependencies or support files.
How would you have implemented that? How maintainable would it have been?