Oh come on, stop with the FUD :) Unlike typical C++ "header only" libraries, the compilation time increase for STB-style "single-file libraries" is completely

Oh come on, stop with the FUD :) Unlike typical C++ "header only" libraries, the compilation time increase for STB-style "single-file libraries" is completely negligible because the implementation is also just compiled once for the entire project. Skipping an ifdef-block happens at IO speed, and this is very fast (at least since we left floppy disks behind). We also don't advice people to not comment their code (skipping ifdef is about as fast as skipping comments), or use one-character variable and function names to speed up compilation ;)