&gt; I wonder whether checking stylistic things should really be in the compiler or part of a separate tool.<p>These checks absolutely should be part of the compiler (and this isn&#x27;t a stylistic warning; it&#x27;s a correctness warning). Our software ecosystem would have been in a far worse place if C compiler developers had decided to not support the -Wall switch in favor of lint(1). There&#x27;s a lot more friction involved with using an external tool compared to just modifying CFLAGS.