[flohofwoe]

> But the C standard library is just awful.

This is very painfully true, but one 'killer feature' of C is that it is useful without ever using stdlib functions (except basics like memset, memcpy, ... which can be considered compiler builtins anyway).

In more recent languages (even C++) there is no such clear distinction between the language and stdlib any more, which IMHO is a real problem (e.g. most of C++'s problems are actually stdlib problems, not language problems).

[pjmlp]

Because it was designed with UNIX API surface in mind, and also the reason why outside embedded and Windows everyone with a C compiler does POSIX, even crufty mainframes that are still being sold.