There isn't really that much unnecessary stuff in there. It's more like 20k LoC but half of it is comments. And if included as a header most of it will get stripped away by the preprocessor.

Just for context, in C++ including std::string (after preprocessing) will pull in 25k LoC, std::vector around 20k.

Programming in C++ by the book will average around 35k LoC per every compilation unit. And it will compile significantly slower than C code.

Having that in mind, and considering that Nuklear doesn't pull in any dependencies, not even C stdlib parts. I think author has done a good job at being lean and fairly straightforward.

UI libs are usually a huge dependency and a hairy mess. This is not really the case. It's just one ~1mb 20k line header file.

There is some overhead on preprocessing over having a .c/.h combo, but that's it.

Reimplementing parts of the standard library is important for applications where you don't neccessarily have access to a standards-compliant libc (read Windows), or if you have need custom malloc/free implementations. Similar techniques are used in automake and similar build generators to provide non-standard libc function implementations. precompiled headers can help with the fact that good portions of the header will be #ifdef'ed away.

I think you completely missed the point of what you're replying to.

You can put those reimplentations in a different file. You don't have to expose the consumer of the library to them by jamming the whole thing, both interface and implementation, in a single header.

This is like library design by the folks who mistakenly say that what they do with '#include <stdio.h>' is they are "including a library". Eg. Compile and link are the same thing in a lot of people's minds, I think increasingly these days as C expertise is diminishing.

Yeah it looks like they are afraid of touching a linker.

I develop on linux primarily but occasionally windows also. The stdlib is totally fine! When did you last compile on Windows? 2011?

All Windows compilers have ANSI C compliant libraries.

once you grasp the concept of immediate mode it is straight forward. You need to parse system events and feed them to Nuklear, then you make a single function that will draw your interface and update the application state variables you need. I like a lot the fact that within just a few lines of code I can have a GUI and focus on the main work...