Hm, this criticism seems hardly fair. systemd is explicitly unportable (it uses glibc/gcc/linux-specific features liberally), this is not some sign of sloppy c

Hm, this criticism seems hardly fair. systemd is explicitly unportable (it uses glibc/gcc/linux-specific features liberally), this is not some sign of sloppy coding, but an explicit design decision as codified in the CODING_STYLE file. Preventing memory leaks and tracking stack allocated variable assignment are not comparable at all. In the vast majority of cases the tracking of stack allocated variable assignments is entirely trivial. The problem with double freeing is also very hard to run into in practice. Getting a memory-leak when you don't use _cleanup_ is all too common on the other hand. Basically, as soon as there are more than one branch in your function you either have to use ugly goto's or remember to free on every branch, in practice either way you are just implementing the _cleanup_ macros manually all over the place (with all the bugs that implies). Why don't you point to some code that would have been better without the use of the macros? It seems you think util.c is a god source of examples...