An exhaustive BMP Loader, MIT-licensed, implemented for c++14 and c++20
The genesis of this project is the initial creation of the OGLFW library, an object overlay of the GLFW library, and the need to associate it with a library for loading images under the MIT license or from the public domain, free of rights, to associate them with icons provided in OGLFW.
Being unable to find such a library under this type of license, a solution was to let users of the original OGLFW library load the images themselves using the external library of their choice, even if not under the MIT license.
Another solution was to propose an Icon class with a virtual image loading
method not implemented in this base class. This second solution allowed users
to derive their own classes from this Icon base class and to implement the
image loading method corresponding to the format of the images to be loaded
(possibly using already existing but less permissively licensed libraries).
To this end, and as an example of implementation, a BMPIcon derived class
has been provided in the OGLFW library. Its implementation had to rely on
an external library which allows the loading of BMP images. Unfortunately,
no library met the required licensing criteria or, when unlicensed or under
MIT license, did not allow decoding of all cases of BMP image encoding.
The CppBMPLoader library therefore fills this gap by offering the only loading of BMP images in all the forms that this image format allows and under the permissive MIT license. It will also meet many other needs when one sees the quantity of questions asked on this subject on the Internet and the number of BMPLoader libraries already existing but apparently incomplete that can be found on GitHub, programmed in c++ or in other programming languages.
Initially, two versions of the library are offered, one responding to standard c++14 of the programming language and the other responding to standard c++20 and offering more advanced programming concepts (e.g. programmed in the form of c++ modules).
Notice: by April and May 2024, this original library OGLFW is still under development.