[dev] Opinions on single-header C libraries

From: <markweston_AT_cock.li>
Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2018 16:18:13 +0300

I was surprised I didn't find a word mentioned about single header
libraries.
The trend has been started by Sean T. Barrett.
The libraries in practice are primarily used for game development.
Here's his repository: https://github.com/nothings/stb
In there, most notable ones would probably be stb_image.h and
stb_vorbis.c

Another interesting example would be an immediate mode GUI library
https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear
Some examples of more complex software with IMGUIs can be found here:
https://gist.github.com/bkaradzic/853fd21a15542e0ec96f7268150f1b62
I would be interested in how it compares, to say, swk

I am particularly interested in the idea of replacing the heavy,
official format libraries (libvorbisfile, libpng, freetype) with their
single-header-library counterparts.
In general, these libraries are:
+ magnitudes of orders smaller in sloc
+ have no dependencies besides libc (some don't even depend on that)
+ are simpler to use
- are slightly slower
- are buggier
- cover only the most common subset (although practically 99% of the
use-cases) of the format
- have fewer developers behind them
- have ad-hoc, if any, version control
Received on Tue Apr 03 2018 - 15:18:13 CEST

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