The state of binary compatibility on Linux and how to address it

Windows having multiple C libraries has its own pain points, in particular it's difficult to ship binary libraries that return allocated memory to their consumer (you either need to have the library consumer allocate the memory, which probably explains why so many Win32 APIs have this behaviour, or allow alloc/free functions to be registered). Not to mention different C libraries having their own file handle, TLS, etc state. Unsurprisingly Microsoft now ships the Universal CRT (UCRT) as part of Windows.

Having consumer allocate the memory where possible has other benefits in that the consumer can use more efficient allocation techniques (stack, arenas etc), and given that Win32 API design goes all the way back to the earliest version of Windows running on very resource-limited PCs, that would be the main reason why.

However, in cases where this wasn't consistently feasible - e.g. COM - Windows instead mandates the use of a common API to manage memory: CoGetMalloc etc.