Gradle native c++ non source files resources or assets folder location?

Question

Context: I am primarily a Java developer and I use gradle for all my builds. As a hobby I've been playing around with C/C++ and found that gradle has the ability to build these as well. So instead of learning cmake/make just for some small hobby projects I thought I'd use gradle since I am familiar with it.

Question: How do I define locations for non-source files?

With Java there is a resources folder that you can put things like images, text files, etc... in and gradle will put these in the jar so in your code you can load them with relative paths pretty easily.

src > main > java for source files.

src > main > resources for assets.

Is there an equivalent way to do this for c++ projects?

Also if there is a default folder that would be good to know, but also how to define it in the build.gradle file to a different location would also be appreciated.

For reference here is my simple build file right now:

apply plugin: "cpp"

model {
  components {
    main(NativeExecutableSpec) {
      sources {
        cpp {
          source {
            srcDir "src"
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

In my code I'd like to be able to load an image, for example, with something like:

HoweverYouLoadAnImageInCpp("imageName.png");

While having a simple structure like:

root
--src
--images

If there is no way to currently do this, is there a workaround or a more standard way people do this in C/C++?

Answer 1

As mentioned in the comments, unlike jars in java, c/c++ does not seem to have a standard way of including assets in the executable. There do seem to be platform specific ways and gradle does seem to have support for Windows resource files, so if that is what you are looking for see the gradle docs.

I prefer not to do any platform specific things though so I thought I'd answer this with what I decided to do in case someone else finds this question with a similar need. If another, better, answer pops up and I notice I will change the selection.

In the end the executable will look for paths relative to where it is executed (from what I can tell at least.) So I just made a copy task to put the assets in a parallel folder.

task copyAssets {
  copy {
    from "."
    into "build/exe/main"
    include "images/**" // This will take the whole images folder from project root
  }
}

build.dependsOn copyAssets

So when I gradle build now it will copy my images folder to the same folder that it builds my 'main' cpp source executable. And in my code I can access those images with:

HoweverYouGetImages("images/imagename.png");

You could of course get more fancy with your task and zip it up or compress your images and decompress on loading in your code.