Yeah, there is no standard for high level APIs provided by operating systems. Everybody has always just done their own stuff. And it's not like the Open Source world is any better, with Linux and the BSDs coming up with their own solutions for common issues.

There's POSIX which is pretty great because it at least allows to write somewhat portable networking & io code. But for pretty much anything else, you'll have to write separate code for every OS, and it's always been the case.