A less portable way to do this (even in C) with GNU ld is ld -r -b binary -o file.o file.ext then link in that in, and you have extern const char _bi

A less portable way to do this (even in C) with GNU ld is ld -r -b binary -o file.o file.ext then link in that in, and you have extern const char _binary_file_ext_start[]; extern const char _binary_file_ext_end[]; to actually address the data.