There is also an option to use assembler or inline asm. I found quite a nice utility that uses inline asm [0]. It's widely portable and I think that I will use

There is also an option to use assembler or inline asm. I found quite a nice utility that uses inline asm [0]. It's widely portable and I think that I will use it instead of my naive asm/shell combo that doesn't work with mingw asm. The problem with objcopy outside of unconvenient usage and naming is that naive objcopy will result in your binary having executable stack [1]. You can change a symbol name, but that's also unconvenient. Check resulting binary with: $ readelf -lW the_binary | grep GNU_STACK GNU_STACK 0x000000 0x0000000000000000 0x0000000000000000 0x000000 0x000000 RWE 0x8 $ Notice: RWE instead RW. Also: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Hardened/GNU_stack_quickstart#How_to_fix_the_stack_.28in_practice.29 https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Hardened/GNU_stack_quickstart#H... [0] https://github.com/graphitemaster/incbin https://github.com/graphitemaster/incbin [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10816322#10818085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10816322#10818085 EDIT: My shell script - bin2o.sh: #!/bin/sh set -e filename="$1" name=$(echo "$1" | sed "s/[^A-Za-z0-9]/_/g") obj="$2" echo \ " .section .rodata .global ${name} .type ${name}, @object .global ${name}_size ${name}: .incbin \"${filename}\" 1: ${name}_size: .int 1b - ${name} .section .note.GNU-stack,\"\",%progbits " | gcc -x assembler -c - -o "$obj"