Embedding of resources into executable needs too much memory

I tried embedding a 7MB resource in an executable and saw this operation needed ~3GB of memory to complete.
This is way too much IMHO. You should be able to embed a file weighing ~1GB with 3GB of memory available.
A way to do this IMHO is generating the .o file without using gcc to compile big files; gcc uses way too much memory for such files.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Have a ~20MB compressed file (so rcc cannot compress it much)
2. Try to compile it statically into an executable using a machine with <=4GB of memory

Expected result:
No problem, this operation is successful and uses little memory (say <100MB).

Current result:
The compilation fails because it runs out of memory.