> "Did you read the snail mail letter from someone who does just that?"
I did. The author struggled embedding files into their executables with makefiles. We don't know anything else beyond that. So what?
People also struggle with memory management in C, an arguably much more difficult and widespread problem. Should we introduce a garbage collector into the C spec? How about we just pull in libsodium into the C standard library because people struggle with getting cryptography right?
OP mentions #embed was a multi-year long uphill battle, with a lot of convincing needed at every turn. That in itself is enough proof that people aren't in clear agreement over there being a single "right" solution. Hence, leave this task to bespoke build systems and be done with it. Let different build systems offer different solutions. Allow for different syntaxes, etc. Leave the core language lean.
> "Did you read the snail mail letter from someone who does just that?"
I did. The author struggled embedding files into their executables with makefiles. We don't know anything else beyond that. So what?
People also struggle with memory management in C, an arguably much more difficult and widespread problem. Should we introduce a garbage collector into the C spec? How about we just pull in libsodium into the C standard library because people struggle with getting cryptography right?
OP mentions #embed was a multi-year long uphill battle, with a lot of convincing needed at every turn. That in itself is enough proof that people aren't in clear agreement over there being a single "right" solution. Hence, leave this task to bespoke build systems and be done with it. Let different build systems offer different solutions. Allow for different syntaxes, etc. Leave the core language lean.