This is an article about the standard library. C has no built in string handling. As an example, there are embedded systems that do no have support for string types due to a lack of support for libraries that handle it, yet they are 100% compliant with the C spec.
The C standard library is specified as part of the language specification document. The language defines two kinds of implementations: "hosted", which must support the entire standard library; and "freestanding", which do not.
Those embedded systems that do not support the full standard library are 100% compliant freestanding implementations, but are not compliant hosted implementations.
