GNU code is partially hard to follow because of RMS paranoia, but that mostly manifests itself in the code being weirdly structured. The far bigger reason is th

GNU code is partially hard to follow because of RMS paranoia, but that mostly manifests itself in the code being weirdly structured. The far bigger reason is that GNU code tends to run with really strange optimizations and project decisions since they want their tools to be able to run on ancient mainframes that practically nobody uses anymore, so everything is overoptimized for that.