[segfaultbuserr]

Creating a lightweight library would make C programming much more productive, and I'm sure many have tried, but I wonder why none of them see widespread applications, instead of writing some half-baked, ad-hoc helper functions.

One reason, I guess, is the diverse range of applications of C, another reason is the lack of advanced features like generics and templates.

But it would still be useful to create a simple library, intended for Unix-like platforms (beyond the BSD extension of stdlib). So it's more of a cultural problem?

[timq]

If I had to guess why there are no such lightweight library, it is because when somehow the library API doesn't provide what you want, you cannot hack the library itself easily. If you import the source code you may have trouble building it, and maintening such "patch" is not a lot of fun.

[segfaultbuserr]

Yes. I guess the fact C doesn't have advanced features like generics and templates probably have made the problem worse, making it difficult to create a "drop-in" API.