> I’m somewhere between horrified and impressed, in that I feel we’ve finally discovered a cross platform binary resource embedding solution.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment about having "finally discovered" that...

For to me embedding binary resources in source files is nothing new at all? It was definitely done in the early JavaScript days for a variety of reasons.

Arguably early basic listings that had lots of DATA text lines were already doing that. Maybe not the most portable but we're talking about the 70s and 80s here and definitely binary data in source code.

Games for the Atari ST and Amiga, for example, could partially share at least some of their source code and it wasn't uncommon to encode binary inside sources, including... Fonts! Back then fonts were not reused from one game to another.

Heck, I've done in Java (and Java is cross platform) in the past: quick visual debug tools for Java GUI apps to toggle a debug mode showing something not dissimilar to a HUD. Pixel-perfect fonts encoded in .java source files.

I really don't think it's anything new.

P.S: I'm pretty sure it's done like for some fonts in the Linux kernel too.