It's called libstdc++ :-) You could make your own library (on top of system calls or libc). It's not going to need to be very big. Unless you get into Unicode

It's called libstdc++ :-) You could make your own library (on top of system calls or libc). It's not going to need to be very big. Unless you get into Unicode handling. My second-hand impression is that glib is really really ugly. I think your best bet is to use some of libc though. I bet you'll want to make a "safe" wrapper of snprintf that uses its format strings, with the annotation for compiler checked format string parameter types.