SIsimias·Jan 6, 2019
Because C has no package system and it sucks, and having a single file (ideally with no dependencies, which isn't the case here) makes it super easy to integrate it anywhere.
A good example of that IMO is cJSON[1], it's a small self-contained single file implementation of a JSON reader and parser. It's easy to use, the code is pretty clean and easy to follow and I never ran into any obvious limitation. I very much recommend it.
There are also projects that are developed as multiple files but amalgamated into a single huge file before release. SQLite does that: https://sqlite.org/amalgamation.html
> Over 100 separate source files are concatenated into a single large files of C-code named "sqlite3.c" and called "the amalgamation". The amalgamation contains everything an application needs to embed SQLite. The amalgamation file is more than 2
Read the rest
20,000 lines long and over 7.5 megabytes in size (as of 2018-11-24).
> Combining all the code for SQLite into one big file makes SQLite easier to deploy — there is just one file to keep track of. And because all code is in a single translation unit, compilers can do better inter-procedure optimization resulting in machine code that is between 5% and 10% faster.
[1] https://github.com/DaveGamble/cJSON