C (programming language) icon
C (programming language) icon

C (programming language)

 321 likes

C is a general-purpose programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs.

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  • Free • Open Source

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5 / 5 Avg rating (5)
321 likes
3comments
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Features

Suggest and vote on features
  1.  Systems programming
  2.  Works at kernel level
  3.  Manual memory management
  4.  Compiled Language
  5.  Inline assembly
  6.  Portable

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C (programming language) information

  • Developed by

    Dennis Ritchie & Bell Labs

  • Licensing

    Open Source and Free product.

  • Rating

    Average rating of 5

  • Alternatives

    62 alternatives listed

  • Supported Languages

    • English

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Our users have written 3 comments and reviews about C (programming language), and it has gotten 321 likes

C (programming language) was added to AlternativeTo by Thelle Christensen on Jun 10, 2012 and this page was last updated Jan 10, 2025. C (programming language) is sometimes referred to as C.

Comments and Reviews

   
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krisszoek
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Top positive comment •Nov 24, 2017

simpler to understand than most modern abstracts, powerful results, good standards and ability to program just about everything from fpga, microcontrollers, computers ,phones to kernels..

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RemovedUser
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Positive comment •
Pending approval • Edited Apr 22, 2024

It is simple and powerful, it has a large ecosystem, it's easy to work with, and plenty more!

People overexaggerate this language a lot because of SIGSEGV (Segmentation Faults), its smaller standard library, and more.

But these issue are easily solvable. SIGSEGV's are easy to debug thanks to debuggers. The standard library provides you with everything you need to implement your own data structures, utilities and more.

Languages like Rust that are known to be "safe" depend a lot on C which is apparently "unsafe". Rust, Zig, and more depend a lot on libc(C's standard library) and bindings to C libraries are just raw calls to C functions.

Today, I do not understand why everyone is trying to replace an irreplaceable language, it's not like someone would be able to rewrite FreeBSD, GNU Emacs, and more complex programs in Rust.

C is here to stay whether you like it or not.

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Oktay Mercan
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Positive comment •Sep 3, 2019

This programming language is low-level and hard to learn. if you want to do low-level stuff you choose right language. Like a write a program for microcontroller or write a OS or kernel.

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What is C (programming language)?

C is a general-purpose programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs. It has found lasting use in operating systems code (especially in kernels), device drivers, and protocol stacks, but its use in application software has been decreasing. C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems.

C is an imperative procedural language, supporting structured programming, lexical variable scope, and recursion, with a static type system. It was designed to be compiled to provide low-level access to memory and language constructs that map efficiently to machine instructions, all with minimal runtime support. Despite its low-level capabilities, the language was designed to encourage cross-platform programming. A standards-compliant C program written with portability in mind can be compiled for a wide variety of computer platforms and operating systems with few changes to its source code.

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