[tialaramex]

Yes the resemblance to the sarcophagus is I suppose warranted. The best of bad options.

The assumption in Fil-C is that you can't or won't rewrite. So a modified C compiler which rejects the uninitialized variable (as Rust would) is not acceptable because now what? We were supposed to make the existing C program memory safe, not reject it, anybody could write a "compiler" which rejects the C programs as unsafe.

This is the same assumption C++ had. C++ 26 lands "Erroneous Behaviour" for this purpose. Previously if you write `int x; foo(x);` that's Undefined Behaviour in C++ just like C, game over, anything might happen if this executes.

In C++ 26 `int x; foo(x);` is Erroneous but not Undefined. It might tell you (perhaps at runtime) that you forgot to initialize x, because doing so is an error - but if it presses on it will behave like `int x = SOMETHING; foo(x)` where SOMETHING was chosen by your compiler and implemented exactly the way you'd expect, by quietly initializing your uninitialized variable.