In fact, the concept of "freestanding implementation" (as opposed to "hosted implementation", which is a implementation of the full standard) exists in C, and is sometimes used in embedded systems:
a conforming freestanding implementation is only required
to provide certain library facilities: those in <float.h>,
<limits.h>, <stdarg.h>, and <stddef.h>; since AMD1, also
those in <iso646.h>; since C99, also those in <stdbool.h>
and <stdint.h>; and since C11, also those in <stdalign.h>
and <stdnoreturn.h>
If we released some sort of libc for embedded systems, specifying only fprintf(), your analogy would be valid.