And then your own custom allocator that would be fitted for your algorithms and vastly faster than malloc.

Yeah, it's a shame we never got something like boost for C. Every company I ever worked for had its own common C library solving these problems.

It's a shame we never got a package manager for C (or C++).

EDIT: perhaps I should have been clearer; by not having one early on, we now have multiple competing package managers, with no clear winner. Responses prove that point.

Although vcpkg is probably the most popular, I’m a fan of https://conan.io/center

Never used this? https://vcpkg.io/en/

I worked at a shop where we used Boost in a C++ code base that the only use of C++ was the harness to use Boost. After that, it was all C, object-styled C, as that code base started before C++ compilers were not a template overlay on C.