stb

https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stretchy_buffer.... Although I get you want an official standard library version, or a built in language feature.

> This header-only containing implementations adds its code to every compilation unit and the linker has to be smart enough to deduplicate identical symbols across many compilation units. That's not how this works. It's actually a pretty clever trick, and it effectively behaves as a .h / .c pair of files. See https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/docs/stb_howto.t...

It's not common, but there are other projects like this for easy integration, especially on embedded systems. You see some C++ libraries that are a single header file include. And here is a collection of single file headers for graphics tasks, like loading images, resizing images, rendering font glyphs, etc: https://github.com/nothings/stb

The author's opinion is uncommon but not unique. A few examples: https://handmadehero.org/ https://ourmachinery.com/post/physical-design/ Simple libs widely used in game dev circles: https://github.com/nothings/stb This one is a full game engine with tools made for educational purpose: https://www.raylib.com/ I do write games and game engine code and tools in C++ without using any of the OOP features. I know quite a few of other professional, experienced and talented developers doing the same, even full AA studios with up to 50 employees. Some of them are going back to procedural C after a few years of disappointment with OOP madness. I'll publish articles about this later, but for now, all I have to say is that it just works. Newbies are often afraid of manual memory management and pointers, but there are simple ways to avoid shooting yo

stb_image is widely used in games https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_image.h

How does this compare to something like https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_image.h ? Is it just that it has more features and can handle weird edge cases?

Here's a rationale for this from an author of very popular many single-header libraries: https://github.com/nothings/stb#why-single-file-headers As to how to use from two separate translation units - you need to define PL_MPEG_IMPLEMENTATION to actually include implementation. So you do that in one of your .c files. Rest of includes will have only declarations included.

Except.. that's pretty much how raw images are represented. Substituting "integers" for "bytes" if you want channel resolution, or leaving integers if you have 32bit pixel depth. https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_image.h#L120 https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL_Surface

I'm thinking of examples like this: https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_image.h It's a complete image loader library in a single header. This header contains everything I need to use that library: the entire documentation, the license, public API declarations and finally the implementation source code. I can read this file from top to bottom to know every little detail about this library, or I can stop somewhere inbetween (for instance when I only want to know how to use the library and what the API looks like, but I'm not interested in the implementation details).

https://github.com/nothings/stb is another set of good header only libraries. (I'm not the author and don't know them, I'm just a happy user.)