Re: C23 thoughts and opinions

On 31/05/2024 14:19, Michael S wrote:

On Fri, 31 May 2024 13:55:33 +0100

No, it does not work like that.
First, copy *exactly* what I said in my previous post.
Only after you reproduced, start to be smart.
_binary_hello_c_size is a link simbol rather than variable.
 Declaration:
extern char _binary_hello_c_size[];
 Usage:
   printf("%zd\n", (size_t)_binary_hello_c_size);

I've now tried all sorts of combinations. While I can display the address of _binary_hello_c_size, it will crash if I try and deference it.
The value of that symbol looks like this:
   00007ff678b90046
It is clearly not the size of the data. But as I said, I can't get inside it. Neither is it simply the end address of the data (they differ by about 2**30).

One small matter is those ugly, long identifiers. A bigger one in
this case is that I really want that embedded text to be zero
terminated; here it's unlikely to be.
>

 The tool is not made specifically for ASCII strings, it is more generic.

There are two possibilities I'm interested in:
* Having the data zero-terminated, for when you want to embed a text
   file as a zero-terminated string
* Everything else, where you just want the binary blob as-is

Unfortunately gcc/ld doesn't recognise the output of objcopy. Even
though it accepts the output of mcc which is the same COFF format.
>

 It recognizes it if lye to objcopy about format.
Specify elf64-x86-64 instead of pe-x86-64 and everything suddenly
works.
It's all was said in my posts from yesterday. It does not sound like you
had read them.

You said RTFM; I did. Nowhere did it say you have to use ELF object format /on Windows/.
So, since I know gcc/ld on Windows understands PE, why didn't work?
You can see there is problem after problem and a number of quirks.
But if you have a fully working demo(you can forget the string requirement, that was just an easy way of showing it had the right data), then I will look at it again.
Even if works however, I don't like it and now don't trust it.
This is why I prefer language-supported solutions, and fortunately in my languages I can make it as simple and intuitive as I like.