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> You cannot even use a global variable safely!

Sorry? I’m unsure what you mean here, because there are plenty of ways to use globals in ways I would call “safe”: no undefined behavior, correct output, …



In one C file you can declare a global:

    int x;
and in another:

    int* x;
and you'll be mixing pointers and ints and it won't be detected.


I was not talking about this, but about aliasing a variable on the same translation unit.

    int x = 7;
    void f() { /* do things using x */ }
    void insidious_function(int *p) { *p = 3; }
now, inside f you cannot be sure that x equals 7, even if you never write into it. You may call some functions, that in turn call the insidious function that receives the address of x as a parameter. There's no way to be sure that the value of x is not changed, just by looking at your code.




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