Embedding resources in executable using GCC

Question

I\'m looking for a way to easily embed any external binary data in a C/C++ application compiled by GCC.

A good example of what I\'d like to do is handling shader cod

Answer 1

The .incbin GAS directive can be used for this task. Here is a totally free licenced library that wraps around it:

https://github.com/graphitemaster/incbin

To recap. The incbin method is like this. You have a thing.s assembly file that you compile with gcc -c thing.s

      .section .rodata
    .global thing
    .type   thing, @object
    .align  4
thing:
    .incbin "meh.bin"
thing_end:
    .global thing_size
    .type   thing_size, @object
    .align  4
thing_size:
    .int    thing_end - thing

In your c or cpp code you can reference it with:

extern const char thing[];
extern const char* thing_end;
extern int thing_size;

So then you link the resulting .o with the rest of the compilation units. Credit where due is to @John Ripley with his answer here: C/C++ with GCC: Statically add resource files to executable/library

But the above is not as convenient as what incbin can give you. To accomplish the above with incbin you don't need to write any assembler. Just the following will do:

#include "incbin.h"

INCBIN(thing, "meh.bin");

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    // Now use thing
    printf("thing=%p\n", gThingData);
    printf("thing len=%d\n", gThingSize);   
}