How to integrate your SDL2 window icon (or any image) into your executable

NOTE: This post has moved to https://blog.gibson.sh/2015/04/13/how-to-integrate-your-sdl2-window-icon-or-any-image-into-your-executable/
The original article is kept here for now, but is not maintained in any way.

Let’s assume you have an image that you want to use as a window icon in your cross-platform application that uses libSDL2.
A suitable window icon is 64x64pixels big (other sizes should work as well, though) and has 32bit RGBA colors, which means it contains an alpha-channel.

Now it would be handy if the icon could just be part of the executable and if this could be achieved in a platform-independent way.
Furthermore it’d be great if it didn’t require additional dependencies (e.g. to decode image files).

In this tutorial I’ll show how to translate the image into C source file containing a struct that holds the image data + necessary metadata (width, height, color depth) and how to load that struct into a SDL_Surface* and to set that surface as a window icon.

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