Heh - I’m actually building hexdump as part of the tinyscheme build process to achieve precisely that effect - no extra tools installed, works across all platforms. What you’re suggesting with file(EMBED) would let me replace the custom target completely and achieve the same result, so it sounds good - I was thinking you might literally be able to create the file sub-command by grabbing hexdump and using it on the backend.
(FWIW I’d probably vote for file(EMBEDDABLE ) to avoid the impression that the file command is actually going to embed something in another file.)