Comment by elcritch

You should read or re-read the article and references. There are multiple benchmarks showing this not to be the case. Actually half the article is a (well deserved) rant about how wrong compiler devs were in thinking that parsing intermediate C sources could ever match the new directive. Compiler internal representation of an array of integers also doesn't require a big pile of integer ast's.

According to the benchmarking data this extension is even 2x faster than using the linker `objcopy` to insert a binary at link time as you suggest.