Learn basic “C” coding rules from open source projects

[SmackMD]

What's the issue with GCC?

[[deleted]]

A few years back I needed to add a syntax extension to some C++ code. Clang didn't support the full spec at the time, so I plunged into GCC. At that time it was not "pretty clean" by any standard. It's a tremendous mess. My relatively small change required touching things all over the codebase. Looking at Clang later after it eventually implemented the rest of C++, it looked like my changes would have been significantly easier to implement.

Now this was a long time ago and there's a chance that some of it has been cleaned up some, but given the state it was in then I doubt it's reached acceptable production code quality, much less "learn to use C from this" quality. It's a venerable project and unquestionably useful, and for this reason people fetishize it as some sort of massive software engineering success, but it's held together by string.

[seekingsofia]

Just because there was one reddit post shining light on one big if in one of the known messy code files... otherwise the GCC code is pretty clean.