eriknyquist:
In this case it would take me a couple of hours to trawl through the librarys and build a pure C file
Why on Earth would you want to do that? The libraries consist of plain old C++ files and you have the source right there in front of you.
Your sketch goes through some subtle mangling to generate the final C++ file that is given to the compiler, but from a developers point of view this is basically just adding in some declarations and includes for you and doesn't change the main body of the code; it's pretty rare that you would need to see the generated C++ since it is almost identical to the .ino code you see in the IDE.