I would assume that this is easy enough to implement that it will likely appear in a minor update to the upcoming Visual Studio version. MS kept updating the compiler since VS 2022, too.

What are you targetting? for instance all ESP32 now support GCC15 which has support for #embed. AVR also has GCC 15 toolchains for months, as well as ARM which also allows you to target STM32 and Nordic nRF stuff.

What current embedded target in $this_year doesn't have a C11 compiler? I'll send you $5 if you can name one.

You're not the only one who feels that way, but IMHO it's not a valid complaint.

The C++ standard says implementation defined because the weeds get very thick very quickly:

- Are paths formed with forward slash or backslash?

- Case sensitive?

- NT style drive letter or Posix style mounts?

- For relative paths, what is it relative to? When there are multiple matches, what is the algorithm to determine priority?

- What about symlinks and hard links?

- Are http and ftp URIs supported (e.g. an online IDE like godbolt). If so, which versions of those protocols? TLS 1.3+ only? Are you going to accept SHA-1?

- Should the file read be transactional?

People already complain that the C++ standard is overly complicated. So instead of adding even more complexity by redefining the OS semantics of your build platform in a language spec, they use "implementation defined" as a shorthand for "your compiler will call fopen" plus some implementation wiggle room like command line options for specifying search paths and the strategy for long paths on Windows

What if #embed steals my credit card data is a pointless strawman. If a malicious compiler dev wanted to steal your credit card data, they'd just inject the malicious code; not act like a genie, searching the C++ spec with a fine comb for a place where they could execute malicious code while still *technically* being standards conformant. You know that, I know that, we all know that. So why are we wasting words discussing it?

#include also searches for the file you give it in an "implementation-defined manner", so if you have this complaint about #embed, you ought to also consider #include equally problematic

This doesn't sound like the kind of portability anyone is really worried about. I get that the docs on the linked site are written in standards-ese and are complicated by macro replacement, but I don't think the outcome of sending your credit card details away is gonna be an outcome. If it was, an uncharitable implementation with access to your card details would be free to do that any time you gave it input invoking undefined behaviour (which is of course not uncommon, especially in incorrect code).

> So now I think to myself: if I want to remain portable, I'll just write a python script

How can you know that your Python implementation won't send your credit card details to an LLM when it runs your script? It does not follow an ISO standard that says it can't do that. You're not making assumptions about it's behavior, are you?

If you want to remain portable, write your code in the intersection of the big 3 - GCC, Clang and MSVC - and you’ll be good enough. Other implementations will either be weird enough that many things you’d expect to work won’t or are forced to copy what those 3 do anyway.

...what? What are you talking about? In what world would a compiler implement a preprocessor directive to ever use an llm, the internet, or your credit card details (from where would it get those)??? There are always implementation defined things in every language, for example, ub behavior. Do you get worried that someone will steal your bitcoin every time you use after free? Of course not! Even in Python when you OOM -- at least in CPython -- you crash with undefined behavior.

this take is basically equivalent to "don't write software unless you write the stack from scratch."