The point is that the tool is opinionated and demands that this be the case for projects that work with it. Not that the author believes all .cc / .h files work

The point is that the tool is opinionated and demands that this be the case for projects that work with it. Not that the author believes all .cc / .h files work that way. Your use case would be served by C23's #embed [1]. The same thing has been proposed for C++ but repeatedly kicked down the road because the standardisation committee wanted to make it more general even though no one had any demand for that so they didn't know what it would look like. (C++ standardisation in a nutshell.) [1] https://thephd.dev/finally-embed-in-c23 https://thephd.dev/finally-embed-in-c23