Beyond general utilities, C thrives in specialized domains where the standard library cannot compete:
Part of the GNOME project, GLib acts as a "surrogate" standard library. It provides the advanced data structures C lacks—like linked lists, hash tables, and string utilities—along with a cross-platform threading abstraction. Beyond the C Standard Library: An Introductio...
For those on Unix-like systems (Linux, macOS), POSIX extends C with vital system calls. It introduces unistd.h for low-level file control, pthread.h for multi-threading, and sys/socket.h for network communication. Beyond general utilities, C thrives in specialized domains