Embed any set of files in C

Man, it would be nice if we didn't have to bundle so many files with the executable

Usage

Build embed.c with any C compiler:

cc embed.c -o embed

Also achievable with make.

Invoke with 3 arguments, --source --header and --function for the source file name, generated header name, and function name for getting the data respectively, then a list of files to embed:

./embed --source shader_sources.c --header shader_sources.h --function get_shader_source shader_foo.glsl shader_bar.glsl

You can then compile and include shader_sources.c and shader_sources.h in your program. Getting a file data is as simple as:

#include "shader_sources.h"
size_t size;
const char* data = get_shader_source("shader_foo.glsl", &size);

All embedded data is also null terminated. If you know that a file is text and contains no null bytes, you may simply pull the data as a null terminated string:

const char* data = get_shader_source("shader_foo.glsl", NULL);

If you pass a file with a path, such as shaders/foo.glsl the file is retrievable by the plain file name without a path, foo.glsl. You can disable this behavior by passing the --preserve-paths option

The tool is designed to be invokable multiple times to embed sets of files grouped logically. For example, in addition to embedding shaders one could also embed textures in a separate pass with a function name get_texture_data

Using with build tools

Meson

Meson makes it really easy to use embed in your build process.

First, add embed as a subproject in your git repository:

git submodule add http://github.com/dougvj/embed subprojects/embed

Then in your meson.build, declare the subproject and pull the embed executable

embed = subproject('embed').get_variable('exe')

Then create a custom target to generate the files

embedded_files = custom_target(
  output: ['shader_data.c', 'shader_data.h']
  input: ['shader_foo.glsl', 'shader_bar.glsl']
  command: [embed,
            '--function', 'get_shader_source',
            '--source', '@OUTPUT0@',
            '--header', '@OUTPUT1@',
            '@INPUT@'])

Then include embedded_files in your list of sources for the final executable:

executable('some_final_executable', [embedded_files] + sources, dependencies)

CMake, Make, etc

Totally doable. Pull requests for examples, or anything else, are welcome

Why not just use ld or xdd to embed binary data?

Because writing my own tools from scratch is its own reward ;)