> "standared C runtime" <...> which should be present on ANY version of <...> Windows Well, depending on how SQLite was linked, it may turn out to depend on a version of C runtime that's [not guaranteed by Windows to be present on a given system](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140411-00/?p=1273). The Windows dependency model is "take it with you", including a C runtime, one of many available versions. Or even many of them in a single process, because different DLLs were linked with different C runtimes. This is part of the reason why SQLite [exports its allocator](https://sqlite.org/c3ref/free.html): so that the user would be able to call the correct copy of `free()` on the pointers allocated by SQLite.