I believe that there are actually some third-party libraries for C, which evolved in the open-source ecosystem since K&amp;R, which potentially provide quite much interesting stuff. At some point I&#x27;ve stumbled upon some string library for example, I believe it might have been <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bstring.sourceforge.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bstring.sourceforge.net&#x2F;</a>. To respond e.g. to your specific concern about containers - some quick googling for &quot;C containers library&quot; seems to give e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.google.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;ccl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.google.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;ccl&#x2F;</a>.<p>So, I believe it might be interesting to do something of a thought experiment, and imagine that C itself is just the language; and for a moment, imagine that it <i>does</i> have some modern standard library; only its modules are unfortunately somewhat scattered over &quot;teh Internets&quot;, but probably just a quick googling away. And to see what comes out of that, and how &quot;modern&quot; one could actually make it feel.<p>Please bear in mind I&#x27;m not up to date with modern C. But this thread reminded me of some stuff I&#x27;ve glanced over here or there at some point, and made me wonder. Personally, I believe the result would not reach 100% high-level-ness of Go or the likes, but I have a feeling it might come uncomfortably near...