Creating a lightweight library would make C programming much more productive, and I'm sure many have tried, but I wonder why none of them see widespread applications, instead of writing some half-baked, ad-hoc helper functions.

One reason, I guess, is the diverse range of applications of C, another reason is the lack of advanced features like generics and templates.

But it would still be useful to create a simple library, intended for Unix-like platforms (beyond the BSD extension of stdlib). So it's more of a cultural problem?