Younger people may not remember one of the early alternatives, libiberty (now at least somewhat improved as gnulib), but as an idea it was even worse: if your s

Younger people may not remember one of the early alternatives, libiberty (now at least somewhat improved as gnulib), but as an idea it was even worse: if your system doesn't provide a GNU compatible function call, it wrote one that hijacked whatever your system did have. It's still bumbling around there in the internals of gcc, silently patching every system it builds on.