incbin VS nimscripter

OK, yes, that does work. You can totally put application specific stuff in the elf and reflect on it at runtime. Much easier is to embed it directly and point a symbol value at the start of the data.

See https://github.com/graphitemaster/incbin for a pretty wrapper around that.

Aside from there being a drastically simpler answer to this problem available in sketchily documented fashion (the asm guys know .incbin is a thing, but higher level languages overcomplicate it), it's a good post. Idea is sound and goal was achieved.

Thanks for the link. We also make static websites by direct inclusion their HTML code in the C++ binary of ClickHouse.

I've tried to use this library but found a bug: https://github.com/graphitemaster/incbin/issues/61

won't work, since the preprocessor won't interpret directives inside string literals of course.

In many assemblers, there is a directive called "incbin" which pastes in unstructured binary data at the point of usage. I just found a very clever C and C++ wrapper [1] for that, which gives you an INCBIN() macro. Nice!

[1]: https://github.com/graphitemaster/incbin

There's always this: https://github.com/graphitemaster/incbin

Haven't the people making the standards other things to do, like, integrating useful features instead of duplicating incbin.h [0] years after that feature worked?

https://github.com/graphitemaster/incbin/blob/main/incbin.h

There is a project "https://github.com/graphitemaster/incbin" that can take a file and put that file content into the sketch ROM segment as constant / resource. It is an even nicer alternative to "xxd -i" or using string literals like: const char bla[] PROGMEM = R"CERT( ... )CERT";

> What does this mean? There's a runtime VM or compile time VM?

Compile time VM. It's used to run macros / templates / concepts. You can also run most code at compile time in a `static` block except for stuff that needs C calls. You can also compile the VM into a program and use it as a runtime VM (see https://github.com/beef331/nimscripter) which I do in my GUI lib. NIR should enable the compile time VM to run faster too, and possibly use JIT'ed code.

Checkout Nim! It does much of what you describe and its great. The core language is fairly small (not quite lua simple but probably ML comparable). It compiles fast enough that a Nim repl like `inim` is useable to check features and for basic maths, though it requires a C compiler, but TCC [4] works perfectly. Essentially Nim + tcc is pretty close to your description, IMHO. Though I'm not sure TCC supports non-x86 targets.

I've never used it but Nim does support some hot reloading as well [3]. It also has a real VM if you want to run user scripts and has a nice library for it [1]. Its not quite Lua flexible but for a generally compiled language its impressive.

Recently I made a wrapper to embed access to the Nim compilers macros at runtime [2]. It took 3-4 hours probably and still compiles in 10s of seconds despite building in a fair bit of the compiler! It was useful for making a code generator for a serializer format. Though I'm not sure its small enough to live on even beefy m4/m7 microcontrollers. Though I'm tempted to try.

1: https://github.com/beef331/nimscripter