Honestly it feels like AI is... something like optimizing for nitpicking "best practices" while completely missing the real issues.

Nobody writes code according to all "best practices". Error handling in the example above is an anti-pattern. This isn't a kernel. Littering your code with NULL checks for memory allocation (and functions which can only fail due to memory allocation failures behind the scenes, like fdopen) is a net negative because it achieves nothing (if small mallocs are failing you code is going to crash anyway) while making the code more obtuse and complex and hard to read, which means real bugs will slip through more often.

If you're the kind of person that cares about having more "strictly correct" code... you shouldn't be using C to begin with, but rather a language where doing that doesn't hurt readability (like Rust). But AI isn't going to give you that advice...

@lina

If you're the kind of person that cares about having more "strictly correct" code... you shouldn't be using C to begin with, but rather a language where doing that doesn't hurt readability (like Rust). But AI isn't going to give you that advice...

LLVM is ensloppifying and Rust relies on it so that's not great. (GCCRust is not ready.)

One could say Ada but Ada is not properly bootstrappable yet.

So the main thing left is formally verified C or formal checkers/proofers/etc with C export like Low*.