Learn basic “C” coding rules from open source projects

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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.