[throwaway12iii]

It's very common in the C/C++ world. The main reason is that you can easily use it in other projects.

Until one of the C/C++ package managers gets good and wins, this is the nicest alternative.

Note that people don't necessarily develop the libraries in one big file or don't have dependencies. Many newer libraries use a single C file as a distribution format.

The other nice thing about it is that if the code is small it can be more easily debugged and audited by humans. If it pulls in hundreds of thousands of lines of code, that can be a problem. Also, small code is a requirement on some projects because of speed or memory limitations.

[frutiger]

> The other nice thing about it is that if the code is small it can be more easily debugged and audited by humans.

The size of the code is independent of the number of files the code is in.

[black-tea]

Yeah because it's really hard to include multiple files in another project...