Come on. Both binutils and nasm can generate perfectly working PE object files. I don't know the answer off the top of my head, but I bet anything even pure MSVC has a simple answer here. Dealing with the nonsense in the linked article is something you do for a quick hack or to test compiler performance, but (as demonstrated!) it scales poorly. It's terrible engineering, period. Use the right tools, even if they aren't ISO-specified. And if you can't or won't, please don't get into fights on the internet justifying the resulting hackery.
> I bet anything even pure MSVC has a simple answer here
You lose your bet, because it doesn't, neither its inline assembler nor actual MASM shipped with Visual Studio support any "incbin"-like directives. I guess you can generate an .asm with a huge db/dd, I guess, if you don't like a large literal array in .c files, but that's it.
> Come on. Both binutils and nasm can generate perfectly working PE object files. I don't know the answer off the top of my head, but I bet anything even pure MSVC has a simple answer here.
Right, meaning you have to implement N solutions instead of just one. It's a common enough and useful enough feature for the language to support it. I think it would be a different story if linkers were covered by the language specification.
I remain shocked at how controversial this is. Yes. Yes, implementing N trivial and easily maintained solutions is clearly better than one portable hack.
Clearly many people disagree. And given that C now has #embed, I don't even think I'd consider it to be a hack.
> I remain shocked at how controversial this is.
I am a bit shocked that you think the right solution to making data statically available to the rest of your program is somehow outside the scope of the programming language.
The comparison wasn't to #embed[1], but to an 8MB static array. You're winning an argument against a strawman, not me. For the record, I think #embed (given tooling that supports it) would be an excellent choice! That's not a defense of the technique under discussion though.
[1] Which FWIW is much less portable as an issue of practical engineering than assembler or binutils tooling!
