> 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

> 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).