Freeing static memory? no, that can't be right

I've been playing around with embedding resources into my c++ program. In order to do this I hexdump the data to a simple array, i.e.

unsigned char image_png[] ={
    0x0a, 0x0b, 0x0c, 0x0d, ...
};

Some of these resources are not used after loading (i.e. they get converted to something else and then the original data is just bulk... though a small bit of bulk for the ease of distribution might be worth it).

I'm curious if there's a way to embed the resource into the program, so that I don't have to w开发者_如何转开发orry about the binary being able to find all it's most important resources, but then free it up after it's done being used so that the runtime memory footprint takes less of a hit.

Is this possible? If it is possible, is it a stupid thing to try to do? For instance, maybe the os will keep the entire program image in memory anyway (I'm not sure exactly how that works).

edit: To answer comments, I'm working on Linux (Ubuntu 10.04), but if there are cross-platform solutions I would love to hear them

---

As Tomaka17 says, you don't really have to worry about it - if you never touch that resource, it will never be faulted in, and it won't consume physical memory. When you load a DLL/so/whatever, it really only maps the file into memory; trying to access that file is what results in actually reading the file, piece by piece.

---

One way I've seen being used in several applications is concatenating the data in the end of the executable, then appending the size of the data itself.

You can then fopen the executable file, go to the end of the stream and read the size of the data, then go back that size and read the resources.

Note that the resources will be exactly as you put them, so organization might be at risk.

I also can't tell if this is a best practice, but it seems to work.