So you change your ways I bet, to accommodate the stubborn cargo cultists who cause toil for you. Here's an alternative for you to consider. Say yes, I can absolutely support you, but if you believe that cc is an ada linter, then you can't use the project in 'preferred form' you have to link against the finished .so / .a binaries, and include the ANSI C89 preprocessed header file amalgamation, which will enable you to use whatever compiler flags you want, but you won't get the benefit of all the fancy macro optimizations and such.