GPIO pins are everywhere


Microcontroller ports are only part of the game
You have GPIO extenders over I2C
Most peripheral chips offer some GPIO pin
You can have a remote controller, behind pci/usb/whatever

We need a flexible API that can be extended over time

Vendors solutions are not "usually" up to the task
They only offer register names
"IOSET1 = n"
Or they offer structures
"GPIOC->IDR"
I'm ready to apologize if you show me good vendor code

The Linux approach grew too complex over time
It can't be replicated in the microcontroller world