any attempt has been made to build a nicer foundational C/OS library since ?
The results are often worse than if they would have used a higher level language right from the start.
Generally though, C is just a terrible language to do anything other than write extremely low level routines in. You should probably just never use strtok() and go straight to something like Ragel or re2c for building high performance tokenizers... then call those from a higher level language.