Advice on how to embed data in a library/executable

[2e71828]

If you want to avoid the cost of parsing the data on every invocation, you could use build.rs to parse it at build time into repr(C) structs, and then use include_bytes!:

Can i conveniently compile bytes into a Rust program with a specific alignment?

The short version: can I specify the alignment of an include_bytes!("...") invocation? My use case here involves a recent crate I published, regex-automata. One of the key features of that crate is the ability to serialize DFAs to raw bytes and then cheaply deserialize them. In particular, deserialization is designed to be a constant time operation that does no heap allocation or mutation. In other words, a deserialized DFA must be able to operate on the raw bytes, which means that we need to t…