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Comment by pebers | Hacker News Reader

You need to do more than just #include it - it is implemented in one .c file but that is not a header, so you'd still need to compile that separately and link it in somehow.

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If you include it (possibly indirectly) in a file which you compile, then no, you do not need to compile it separately.

Not really. All you need to do is:

  #ifndef __onefilelib__
  #define __onefilelib__
  #include "onefilelib.c"
  #endif

(Also potentially defining "main" as something else, if it happens that the "onefilelib.c" has an entry point for some reason.)

You should really be careful about c preprocessor macros when you do things like this with .c files. You should always undefine any macros defined in a file which are not properly namespaced(as much as C allows for pseudo namespacing).

Is there a prominent C code base that does this sort of thing? I’m sorry this is all very questionable advice IMHO. What would be one word in a makefile (onefilelib.c) is a 4-line jumble of preprocessor macros, names starting with __ are reserved, and the suggestion to redefine main and entry points smells like more #ifdef spaghetti.

I am not sure of a prominent code base that does this exactly, but some people do similar things with "amalagmated builds". Like https://www.sqlite.org/amalgamation.html

The #ifndef rigamarole is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Include_guard and at least used to be fairly common. I also used to see the __FOO_BAR_H__ naming convention for these defines all over the place. I'm not sure if __ identifiers being reserved is a (not very) new thing or if it's always been around and people are just now more generally knowledgeable about the fact that they shouldn't be used.

Yes, the include guard is a very widespread technique for header files. My objection is against #include’ing a .c file to support the questionable trend of ‘single file libs’.

I wasn't suggesting this as a serious method of organizing your project - merely pointing out that this quick hack can be done and is rather straightforward. And I did actually see it once or twice in the wild.

This only does what you want if you mush everything together into a single translation unit. Otherwise, you will get duplicate definitions for everything in onefilelib.c.

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