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I meant a runtime that has to be installed separately. It's possible to statically link a C runtime if you use musl, for example

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You mean like it happens on many OSes that aren't GNU/Linux?

A language runtime remains one, independently on how it was linked into the binary.

A language runtime are the set of operations that support the language semantics, which in C's case are everything that happens before main(), threading support (since C11), floating point emulation (if needed), execution hooks for running code before and after main(), delayed linking, and possibly more, depending on the compiler specific extensions.

You're being pedantic and trying to argue as if I misunderstand language runtimes and am speaking against language runtimes in general. That's not true. I qualified "the language runtime that's installed on that OS" from the beginning.

Like on Windows for the Universal C Runtime?

I can give other non-GNU/Linux examples.

I don't have any negative experience with that one, but I remember having to manually install various versions of the Windows C++ runtimes to get an app working

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