I don't want to disparage any project or guess the motivation but there have been some undercurrents of anti-GPL sentiment at times and anti-complexity. Folks have sort of backed it up by posting some links to things that aren't as you might think. GLIBC in particular looks nothing like how you might imagine it. You can look at strlen in the K&R book and it's beautiful, like a textbook: int strlen(char s[]) { int i; i = 0; while( s[i] != '\0') ++i return i; }

then you look at: https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=string/strl...

and your mind will sort of explode for a bit. The difference is the GLIBC version is dramatically faster; take the comments away and most of us wouldn't even know that's strlen. It's more complex, no question, but it's much faster. GLIBC is full of stuff like that. qsort and memcpy are non-obvious to many folks. It's not complexity for no reason, you'd be challenged to build a better qsort than the one in glibc, it's not easy.