For runtime, you can certainly read any arbitrary binary file in C without problems. For compile time, I make heavy use of xxd -i to generate header files in a

For runtime, you can certainly read any arbitrary binary file in C without problems. For compile time, I make heavy use of xxd -i to generate header files in a range of projects. It is no longer installed by default on most +nix systems, but it is generally still in your package manager (often installed alongside vim), and has been around since 1990.