Rather than having control of devices specified by a programming language, the interfaces to devices are handled by libraries. The organizations that specify the C and C++ standards are different from the organizations that specify libraries for graphics and sound. Thus, the official C and C++ standards do not mention libraries such as Cairo, GTK and wxWidgets since those libraries are specified by other organizations. (This is also the case for other programming and scripting languages. For example, the standard for Ruby does not cover Rails because Rails has a separate standard.)

Also, there are organizations that give alternate or supplementary standards for C and C++. In addition to the ISO standard for C, the POSIX standard for C specifies things strategically neglected by the ISO standard. Each of these standards has advantages.