incbin

Include binary files in C/C++

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8Distinct people

8Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

1.2KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

Include binary files in C/C++

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 5:05:26 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year8 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-05-10 12:39:24 UTC to 2025-12-26 23:10:43 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

2 sources

zX41ZdbW·Jul 23, 2023

Thanks for the link. We also make static websites by direct inclusion their HTML code in the C++ binary of ClickHouse. I've tried to use this library but found a bug: https://github.com/graphitemaster/incbin/issues/61

In The theory versus the practice of “static websites”

sixdimensional·Jul 15, 2023

Tangentially, I've been exploring something kind of fascinating... So, in compiled binary executables it was not uncommon to include encoded binary resources, like files or images. Not tons of them, because they would explode the size of the executable. For example, for C or C++ https://github.com/graphitemaster/incbin So here's the interesting part - we decided to build executables in a way that data in those executables could not be changed (makes sense since it's compiled and the compiled code runs on the machine, and for security reasons). That said, think about what a container (e.g. docker) is. A running container is kind of like a packaged executable, except it also has a filesystem. So if you pack data (which can be modified and runtime!) into a container, it's a similar concept to an embedded resource in an executable, except i

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t can change. Now, in a container, any changes made to data at runtime inside the container won't persist unless the container is given persistent storage. What I've been wondering lately is why we didn't invent some kind of single "executable plus volatile data space embedded within the executable", so that programs and data (say, a database) could couple together into a single file. Just a musing but tangentially related to your "baked data" - basically, embedded resources in executables just embeds the encoded data right into an executable. For scripting languages, of course, we can just make a script file that contains a variable with the encoded data as base64 directly. For the latter 2, it's only good for relatively small static data of course, but it would be interesting to build tech that somehow lifted that constraint of executables.

In The theory versus the practice of “static websites”