[flohofwoe]

Just my guess: C doesn't depend as much on its standard library as other languages (which has its good and bad sides), and this also means that fixing the standard library isn't very high on the priority list of the C committee, because everybody knows that for any serious work the stdlib isn't suitable anyway.

The C stdlib is basically the lowest common denominator which enables writing very simple UNIX-style mostly-cross-platform command line tools, but not much else. For anything serious you either call OS API functions directly, or resort to specialized third-party libs.

Attempting to 'fix' the stdlib would first mean agreement on what such a stdlib should actually contain and look like, and this has a real risk of ending up in C++ Commitee style busywork (e.g. lots of activity with little to show for).