> twenty five thousand lines of pure C not counting CMake files. ...

Keep in mind this is also 31 years of cruft and lord knows what.

Plan 9 gzip is 738 lines total:

  gzip.c 217 lines
  gzip.h 40 lines
  zip.c  398 lines
  zip.h  83 lines

Even the zipfs file server that mounts zip files as file systems is 391 lines.

edit - post a link to said code: https://github.com/9front/9front/tree/front/sys/src/cmd/gzip

> ... (and whenever working with C always keep in mind that C stands for CVE).

Sigh.