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by kazinator 1370 days ago
Sure, but let's look at the larger picture. If you have one file, then that's your deliverable. You can host that file somewhere, send it as an e-mail body, drop it into a paste-bin or whatever. It is one self-contained unit.

If you have two files: .h and .c, the use scenario may be simpler. Not a lot though. And now youu have two files which have to stay together somehow, yet remain distinct. If you combine them in one body of text, you have to indicate: oh, please snip out this part as a .h file and then the rest as a .c file. In e-mail you can have it as two separate MIME attachments. You can use an archive file --- have you looked into the formats? Not so simple.

It's not hard to understand the attraction to the one file deployment, even if you don't do it yourself.
1 comments
mrweasel 1370 days ago
Can you do something like what SQLite does an squash the .h and .c into one file, but also have multiple files for those who are doing development or just like separate files?
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kazinator 1370 days ago
Yes, I can, and so can you, without a doubt.

If I wanted to distribute a single file library, but have the two file option for users, I'd make it so that a specific Awk one-liner produces the two. For instance, the file might look like this:

   #ifndef FOOBAR_LIB_H_D3B94F3C
   #define FOOBAR_LIB_H_D3B94F3C

   // header stuff here

   #endif // FOOBAR_LIB_H_D3B94F3

   #if FOOBAR_LIB_IMPL

   // impl here

   #endif
Then to people who want two, I would say, just run this command in your shell and paste the content into it:

   awk 'BEGIN { print "#include \"foobar.h\"" > "foobar.c"
                print "#define FOOBAR_LIB_IMPL" > "foobar.c" }
        /#ifndef FOOBAR_LIB/,/#endif.*FOOBAR_LIB/ { print > "foobar.h"; next }
        { print > "foobar.c" }'
that way I wouldn't need a build step on my end to generate parallel files.

I would have the extra build step if it were a large project of multiple .c files that I wanted to deploy as a single file for the users who want that. (Not only would I build the single file out of multiple files, but also have some test cases which actually use it. Things have ways of breaking when you combine files, like giving the same name two two static variables or functions in different files.)

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