Anyone who is interested in secure, plain, well-written C-code should checkout the OpenBSD project. I've just been browsing through the code to brush-up on my C as it's been a few years since I've had to use C in anger, and it's a joy to read.
Whenever I look at BSD code, it reminds me of how we did everything in the '80s. There's an esthetic to stone knives and bearskins (check out "Primitive Technology" series on YouTube) but performance suffers on modern hardware.
Linux is irredeemably complex, and getting moreso all the time. My code nowadays bypasses it wherever possible -- O_DIRECT files, memory-mapped files, kernel-bypass NIC libraries that set up hardware ring buffers mapped into user address space.
