I'm writing some code which stores some data structures in a special named binary section. These are all instances of the same struct which are scattered across many C files and are not within scope of each other. By placing them all in the named section I can iterate over all of them.
In GCC, I use _attribute_((section(...)) plus some specially named extern pointers which are magically filled in by the linker. Here's a trivial example:
#include <stdio.h>
extern int __start___mysection[];
extern int __stop___mysection[];
static int x __attribute__((section("__mysection"))) = 4;
static int y __attribute__((section("__mysection"))) = 10;
static int z __attribute__((section("__mysection"))) = 22;
#define SECTION_SIZE(sect) \
((size_t)((__stop_##sect - __start_##sect)))
int main(void)
{
size_t sz = SECTION_SIZE(__mysection);
int i;
printf("Section size is %u\n", sz);
for (i=0; i < sz; i++) {
printf("%d\n", __start___mysection[i]);
}
return 0;
}
I'm trying to figure out how to do this in MSVC but I'm drawing a blank. I see from the compiler documentation that I can declare the section using __pragma(section(...)) and declare data to be in that section with __declspec(allocate(...)) but I can't see how I can get a pointer to the start and end of the section at runtime.
I've seen some examples on the web related to doing _attribute_((constructor)) in MSVC, but it seems like hacking specific to CRT and not a general way to get a pointer to the beginning/end of a section. Anyone have any ideas?