That's just a legacy of the strategy where NT native APIs were considered a private API, and you were meant to code against Win32 instead, to target both NT and

That's just a legacy of the strategy where NT native APIs were considered a private API, and you were meant to code against Win32 instead, to target both NT and 9x. Syscalls are in ntdll, layered above that is kernel32 (today kernelbase), then most user mode code including CRT is above that. In 9x kernel32 were syscalls, in NT they were user mode shims above ntdll. That's for most things. Things like gdi have kernel entry points too afaik. Anyway my point is that the C library is developed out of band from that.