I once had good reason (or at least I thought so!) to code-generate nested structures into .rodata by way of thousands of static arrays (each with its own varia

I once had good reason (or at least I thought so!) to code-generate nested structures into .rodata by way of thousands of static arrays (each with its own variable), referenced by other static arrays, referenced by static structs… The application was a highly optimized encoding of Aho-Corasick state machines for megabytes of static dictionary strings. The code generation (not in C) was trivial, and along with .rodata came all the benefits of shared pages and lazy loading. Across a number of compilers I only ran into one bug in 32-bit gcc, which was worked around easily by disabling the (unhelpful) optimization pass that was getting snarled.