Embed binary files and resources (such as GLSL Shader source files) into C++ projects.

Include this repository in your CMake based project:

git submodule add https://github.com/cyrilcode/embed-resource.git lib/embed-resource

Then add to your CMakeLists.txt for your project:

include_directories(lib/embed-resource)
add_subdirectory(lib/embed-resource)

Now you can add your resources, by calling the provided embed_resources() function in your CMakeLists.txt file:

embed_resources(MyResources shaders/vertex.glsl shaders/frag.glsl)

Then link to your binary by adding the created variable to your add_executable statement:

add_executable(MyApp ${SOURCE_FILES} ${MyResources})

In your C++ project you can access your embed resources using the Resource class provided in Resource.h. Here's an example:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

#include "Resource.h"

int main() {

    Resource text = LOAD_RESOURCE(frag_glsl);
    cout << string(text.data(), text.size()) << endl;

    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

NB: To reference the file, replace the . in frag.glsl with an underscore _. So, in this example, the symbol name is frag_glsl.

This uses ideas from this blog post which included the Resource class and macro idea. Unfortunately, the use of ld command didn't work on OSX. So, instead, I've used a simple C++ executable that does the same conversion, based on ideas from this Stack Overflow question.

Public Domain / WTFPL