UnicodeData class is not working without reflection

Simple call to UnicodeData.GetBidiData produce error in NativeAOT reflection-free mode. Even reflection-free mode is niche, would be good somehow provide workaround for these scenarios.

Underlying issues is https://github.com/SixLabors/Fonts/blob/034a440aece357341fcc6b02db58ffbe153e54ef/src/SixLabors.Fonts/Unicode/UnicodeData.cs#L45-L48

Embedded resources unlikely will even work in reflection-free mode for NativeAOT so maybe would be possible provide some additional API which provide additional sources for these data, maybe from extenally supplied Stream?

[Sergio0694]

I can probably help with the source generator part. Happy to put together a small prototype if you need 🙂 To save the unpacking time though you’d also need to find a way to precompute the data you need somewhat, so that there’d be less work to load it after getting the embedded binary blobs. That’s orthogonal though, so the two problems can be tackled separately. Even just doing this embedded resource trick alone would at least fix the issue related to reflection 👍

[Sergio0694]

Not as nice to work with, but it should be possible to just embed these files directly in the assembly as ReadOnlySpan<byte> (so they just get embedded in the .data section and are free and with no reflection). I could see hacking together either a small script to generate this, or maybe a source generator to annotate files in the project and have it generate the properties for you (ie. use the AdditionalFiles provider from Roslyn, get the list of files à la CsWin32, read, emit the binary blob in some target class). That’d solve the issue mentioned here, especially given all these files are known at build time in this case 🙂