How to refer to the start-of a user-defined segment in a Visual Studio-project?

Question

I\'m struggling to convert a C-program linked with ld, of the gnu tool-chain to make it compile as a visual-studio (2005) project. The program puts .data-symbols in differe

Answer 1

Create additional segments (they are placed in memory alphabetically):

#pragma data_seg("MY_DATA_FOO__a")
#pragma data_seg("MY_DATA_FOO__z")
#pragma data_seg("MY_DATA_FOO__m")

__declspec(allocate("MY_DATA_FOO__a")) int fooFirst;
__declspec(allocate("MY_DATA_FOO__z")) int fooLast;
__declspec(allocate("MY_DATA_FOO__m")) int foo1;
__declspec(allocate("MY_DATA_FOO__m")) int foo2;

Then copy everything between &fooFirst and &fooLast.

Answer 2

padding can be removed by segments merging

for example

#pragma data_seg(".foo_begin")
#pragma data_seg(".foo_data")
#pragma data_seg(".foo_end")

#pragma comment( linker, "/merge:.foo_begin=.foo" )
#pragma comment( linker, "/merge:.foo_data=.foo" )
#pragma comment( linker, "/merge:.foo_end=.foo" )

__declspec(allocate(".foo_begin")) int foo_begin_marker;
__declspec(allocate(".foo_end")) int foo_end_marker;

__declspec(allocate(".foo_data")) int foo_data;