u/side2k

I'm new to C. I have a small SDL2 project. At some point I needed to load and draw image sprites and found nice library stb_image.h. Probably best way here would be to just download the stb_image.h file and commit it to the repo, but I thought it would be a nice exercise towards learning how to manage dependencies. Since C doesn't seem to have anything like cargo, PyPi or npm, I started to look for best practices on how to do that.

So, this is what I came up with so far, with a Makefile:

• dependency file as a target, with commit pinned as separate var

STB_IMAGE_COMMIT := 013ac3beddff3dbffafd5177e7972067cd2b5083

vendor/stb/stb_image.h:
	curl -fsSL --create-dirs https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nothings/stb/$(STB_IMAGE_COMMIT)/stb_image.h -o $@

• making it prerequisite to the main build target:

build/%.o: src/%.c | build vendor/stb/stb_image.h
	$(CC) $(CFLAGS) -c $< -o $@

This seems simple, reproducible and efficient to me. But I'm not sure it would scale well and also - maybe there are better approaches out there?

By default, clang-format does this:

  SDL_Window *window =
      SDL_CreateWindow("SDL2 test", SDL_WINDOWPOS_UNDEFINED,
                       SDL_WINDOWPOS_UNDEFINED, 500, 500, SDL_WINDOW_RESIZABLE);

and with some tweaks it does this:

    SDL_Window *window = SDL_CreateWindow(
        "SDL2 test",
        SDL_WINDOWPOS_UNDEFINED,
        SDL_WINDOWPOS_UNDEFINED,
        500,
        500,
        SDL_WINDOW_RESIZABLE);

Second one has some practical advantages - it easier to read diff on arg change and easier to add comments:

    SDL_Window *window = SDL_CreateWindow(
        "SDL2 test",
        SDL_WINDOWPOS_UNDEFINED, // just some comment explaining why
        SDL_WINDOWPOS_UNDEFINED,
-       400,
+       500,
        SDL_WINDOW_RESIZABLE);

While the first one seems to have mainly historical reasons to keep around. Perhaps, there is something I don't see? Because it feels like the first way is still used the most. And its the default one for clang-format.

I'm genuinely curious.