I've written Windows programs without the std library. The Win32 has plenty of replacement functions you can use instead though so it's much less work than what's presented here.
You get the same sorts of benefits though.
You get the same sorts of benefits though.
You can get reduced executable size and a lack of dependencies on various msvc*.dlls, without giving up much of the functionality of the C standard library and without having to write it all yourself.
So you can't really go without it.