Has anyone tried this? What do you think?

https://hackaday.com/2021/11/08/linux-fu-automatic-header-file-generation/

I've been programming this way for a while. I just put everything in .h files and include them in a stack. The problem I am starting to run into, is when two things need to know about each other,and I have to do forward declarations which is a pain. I want to code like they do in the modern languages, so I don't have to worry about that kind of thing.

This is small and mature. Why don't they put it in C?

https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/tools/makeheaders.html

https://fossil-scm.org/home/file/tools/makeheaders.c

You can use the C subset of C++20, which does the same thing without generating headers to begin with. This is faster by exporting the functions into a compiled module, like an object file but including header information, instead of copy-pasting headers with quadratic complexity. There are however still cases where one would want headers for the sake of documentation and external linking.

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/modules

I'm still waiting for the feature to mature before considering it for new projects.

I've been testing it, and it looks like it won't be of any use to me. It doesn't see macros I am using to make generic structs and functions.

"You can use the C subset of C++20"

I saw a couple of people on Casey's Twitter complain that everyone uses their own subset of C++, and because C++ is so big, they don't understand the code their co-workers produce. So perhaps a good feature for any new or current language, would be a way to deal with that.

...

I've copied Casey's method of including all .h files with structs in them before the .c files, and it has made it easier.

Perhaps a third file type with function prototypes in it, included between the .h and .c include groups would make it even easier.

Could also make a text editor grouping headers and source files together, so that the header is shown at the top of a combined document. Then no dependency on code generators.