Your comment reminded me of the early days when I learned C in the mid 1980s, and I complained about the lack of a string type (which I had been used to from Pascal, Modula-2 and even BASIC), people said one should have the freedom to implement them as 0-terminated strings or using length and a char array, or even in other ways.

To me that has always been a lame excuse for a poor standard library. You can always build your own, even if the standard library has a solution that works for 99% of cases - and that makes 99% of code more readable to 100% of people.

I love C (let's not get into a C++ rant here..) so this is just a comment about the culture, like the parent post. The fact that people who don't like to re-invent the wheel have not stuck with C, and maybe gone to join the Perl, Python, Java... communities made this issue worse over the years.

In theory, this could still be done now (e.g. a standard build system), but I think most "systems language" innovation action now firmly happens in the Rust camp (which may be a good thing, because the world needs more safe code).