> My favorite C code is the one that has no macros, as few of typedefs as possible, no acrobatics with alloca() or any platform-dependent stuff.

You've just outlined a perfectly good subset of C. I'm pretty sure people who write C extensively even to this date mostly end up there. The beauty of using C these days is that one gets to control every single byte without going through hoops and loops. Also, any C code can be reliably integrated into other languages using FFI, which is quite universal. So, yeah, no need to create dirty hacks.