So what you're saying is that C lets you write it on your own. In fact, and this might sound crazy, but you can do that exact same thing in C++, it's just that people don't because the C++ standard library provides plenty of performant and featureful data structures for you.

Besides, anything the C++ standard template library map does when implementing a red-black tree is exactly what you would need to do if you wrote your own, minus having things like allocators (which are incredibly useful for those that need them). You speak of overhead due to "objects, classes and implicit memory management". Inevitably, any implementation of a data structure of substance in C ends up looking like c++-ified C. Want to create your hashtable? Call hashtable_init and get back a hashtable_t. Want to insert into it? Pass your hashtable_t, a key and a value into hashtable_insert. Even worse, you either have the choice of making all of your data void* in the data structure and casting into and out of your interface or making awful macros to define the various methods and structures for the types you would like to use. It's like you're stubbornly writing C++ in C.