Proposal: static resource embedding expressions

[hydroper]

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Rust has include_str!("./data.txt") and include_bytes!("./data.bin") macros. So I propose the same for Carbon. In my language I use embed './data.txt':String and embed './data.bin':ByteArray.

I think C++ doesn't have that feature, but it's compatible, depending on the expression output. .NET languages support resource embedding via project configuration, not expressions.

Motivation

• Embedding octet-stream resources through string literals (like '\0\x0a') is bad due to writting octets as code points (not all octets are legal code points) (update: no, actually U+00 to U+FF are valid). But also, it may be inefficient to parse large string literals. For example:

'\0\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff...'

• Embedding octet-stream resources through array initializer (like [0, 0x0a]) is inefficient when the resource is large, since it'll create lots of nodes. For example:

[0, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, ...]

(see the amount of numeric literals).

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