I remember being truly shocked when I first read the source code to Dan Bernstein's qmail and djbdns. I had been programming in C forever at that point, but it

I remember being truly shocked when I first read the source code to Dan Bernstein's qmail and djbdns. I had been programming in C forever at that point, but it was so different to anything I had seen before it was a real paradigm shift. Extremely idiosyncratic, but rich with ideas for ways to make software more reliable and secure. For example, because old-school C strings are the source of so many bugs, he created his own string library (stralloc[1]) which was incredibly straightforward to understand and use and avoided all the many many footguns that C strings are prone to. [1] https://cr.yp.to/lib/stralloc.html https://cr.yp.to/lib/stralloc.html