Comment by saagarjha
3 years ago
This is literally the premise of this comment chain. Can you see how the standard can get dragged around by various competing needs? People want to embed strings, with null termination, some just want to embed binary data. Neither is particularly “wrong”. And in this thread everyone is presenting “obvious” solutions that are one or the other.
No, at least in this case I think the feature chooses the correct path on this. If you want to embed a string that’s null terminated then just save the string into a file as a null terminated string or copy it from the array to a proper string type. It looks like you may even be able to use this with a struct which might let you add a null termination after the array.
Though yes I agree lots of features get bogged down trying to handle everything. But in this case not adding it creates even more complexity. You can store strings natively in C. You can’t include binary blobs in C in a platform independent way so you have hacks that explode compile times for everyone using that software.
The ability to add vendor specific attributes also allows for those use cases to evolve naturally while still solving the core problem of embedding binary data.
I, FWIW, agree with the implementation. I'm just saying that this thread has someone saying "the compiler should add null termination" in it so the choice to make is not obvious.