alt Hacker NewsIn the world of Kubernetes and languages where a one-liner brings in a graph of 1700 dependencies, and oceans of Yaml, it's suddently important for a C thing to be one file rather than two.
Replies
fonheponho • yesterday at 9:17 PM
Exactly; I can't understand this obsession with header-only C "libraries".
quotemstr • yesterday at 9:16 PM
Writing new C code in 2026 is already an artisanal statement, so why not got all the way in making it?
C libraries have advertised "header-only" for a long time, it's because there is no package manager/dependency management so you're literally copying all your dependencies into your project.
This is also why everyone implements their own (buggy) linked-list implementations, etc.
And header-only is more efficient to include and build with than header+source.