Patterns for Organizing Files in Modular C Programs

Abstract

Implementing large and modular C programs is tricky, because there hardly is any support by the C programming language and hardly any guidance for implementing large C programs in a way that they become modular and thus maintainable. In order to implement modular C programs, as with any other programming language, the question arises how to split the code into different files and where to put these files. While there are conventions in other programming languages on how to do that (e.g. Java advices how to structure files for packages), there are no such specific conventions for C programs. To address this issue, this paper presents design patterns containing guidance on how to structure files for modular C programs.