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nothings
stb
C2014–2026
nothings / stb

stb

stb single-file public domain libraries for C/C++

Libraries & SDKs
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
78Distinct people
111Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
35KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

stb single-file public domain libraries for C/C++

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 5:58:02 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year111 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2014-09-21 13:39:14 UTC to 2026-08-10 10:10:33 UTC.

0510152014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 2 submissions, 3 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 3 submissions, 12 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 4 submissions, 4 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 3 submissions, 5 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 2 submissions, 10 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 2 submissions, 12 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 1 submissions, 8 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 1 submissions, 8 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 3 submissions, 5 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 1 submissions, 6 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC523
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC15312
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC844
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC835
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC12210
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14212
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC918
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC918
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC835
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC716
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505

What Hacker News says

15 sources
networked·Jul 3, 2016
I was (pleasantly) surprised to find out Fossil used a Tcl-like language for templating. Tiny Tcl implementations are fun in general and perhaps easier to produce than tiny Scheme implementations — as long as you are willing to concede that everything really is a string. :-) (I.e., no caching binary representations; you have to parse from scratch each time.) In a similar vein as TH1 but with a little more functionality there are Picol (https://tcl.wiki/Picol) and LIL (http://runtimeterror.com/tech/lil/). Disclosure: I maintain an expanded fork of Picol. The original version of it written by antirez was only ~550 LOC but with suchenwi's additions and mine it is now around 3100. There is a link to it on the wiki page. The change that I am most fond of is making it an stb-style (https://github.com/nothings/stb/) header library.
In The Tcl War (1994)
dmytroi·May 5, 2016
One practical example would be tigr [1] - a cross platform window framework for making simple applications, could be compiled as one header drop-in only lib. You simply cannot make it one header without making calling ObjC runtime from C. Why it's necessary to make it work as one drop-in header? Well it's a new trend in C libraries, which allows using libraries with the least resistance possible, it's like a package manager but nicer - you only have one file! Great example of modern one header libs is probably the famous stb package [2]. - [1] https://bitbucket.org/rmitton/tigr/src - [2] https://github.com/nothings/stb
In OS X app in plain C
hthh·May 1, 2016
"High quality" is an strange concept. I would look at code you actually use and rely on - that's the best indication of quality. A lot of critical code deals with inelegant, complex problems correctly and efficiently - I'd consider anything that can be relied on to manage that "high quality", even if it is unclean, inelegant, poorly formatted and algorithmically mundane. That said, if you want to read elegant code, I'd recommend the stb parser libraries (written in C). They are small self-contained decoders for many common media formats, with excellent documentation: https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_image.h https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_truetype.h https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_vorbis.c These libraries are likely insecure, handle many edge-cases incorrectly, implement fewer features, and p
Read the rest
erform worse than other options. However, they meet your criteria better.
In Ask HN: What are examples of GitHub repositories with high code quality?
fsloth·Feb 1, 2016
"What about unit-testing framework and some best practices?" A random collection of anecdotal stuff and opinions that comes to my head: For common utilities for game development stb libraries are fantastic: https://github.com/nothings/stb For general idea how to structure code you could google "data oriented design c++". Try not to structure your solution around class hierarchies but prefer data pipelines. Write your code so that it's easy to debug. Prefer to structure your solutions around stl containers and stl algorithms. Avoid using inheritance as long as it does not reduce code complexity. If you use inheritance prefer to use only abstract base classes. Do not use template metaprogramming unless you are absolutely sure it's the most simple way to solve your problem. Avoid multiple inheritance like the plague. Ignore my advice if your
Read the rest
problem is such that they don't make sense. Try not to solve any other problem than the one you have immediately in front of you, and solve it as fast and simply as possible. Do not try to create some "framework" to solve your problems but prefer simple code. Refactor your code as your program progresses. This point might be obvious - but for me personally has been the most difficult thing to learn - writing agressively simple code is the best thing I've learned. This does not mean that the abstractions that are implemented are necessarily simple - just that the implementation is as easy to read, easy to debug and easy to reason about it's dependencies, as possible. If you can trade off complexity of dependency with a little bit more code, prefer little bit more code. I.e. if you have an itch to include a library because you need a single function, think hard about implementing or copy pasting the function to your codebase. Once you are confident enough that you know you need something, only then include it. Learn some OCaml :) - really, I feel like much better C++ programmer after I understood how a properly designed language with a static type system works. (I hear "Real world OCaml" is a good book).
In Why I'm Choosing C++
chubot·Jan 23, 2016
Uh, this stb library [1] seems to follow a horrible pattern: not only combining your code into a single .c file (which is fine, like the sqlite amalgamation), but putting the code into a single .h file. [2] I've never seen a C or C++ codebase that does this. Maybe you can rely on link-time deduplication, but it will still cause duplicate compilation, and thus increased compile times. I haven't thought it about it lately, but I thought the common wisdom was not to depend on the linker to dedupe or strip unused symbols. Actually it should cause link-time errors, not just duplicated cause. The justification is also somewhat ridiculous: Why single-file headers? Windows doesn't have standard directories where libraries live. That makes deploying libraries in Windows a lot more painful than open source developers on Unix-derivates generally
Read the rest
realize. (It also makes library dependencies a lot worse in Windows.) Really? Why not just lay out your source normally, and then munge it with a simple script into something Windows can handle (similar to sqlite)? Because writing trivial scripts on Windows is also a pain? [1] https://github.com/nothings/stb [2] https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_c_lexer.h
In Single-file public-domain/open source C libraries with minimal dependencies

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