C (programming language)

C (pronounced /ˈsiː/ – like the letter c)^[6] 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^[7]), device drivers, and protocol stacks, but its use in application software has been decreasing.^[8] C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems.

A successor to the programming language B, C was originally developed at Bell Labs by Ritchie between 1972 and 1973 to construct utilities running on Unix. It was applied to re-implementing the kernel of the Unix operating system.^[9] During the 1980s, C gradually gained popularity. It has become one of the most widely used programming languages,^[10][11] with C compilers available for practically all modern computer architectures and operating systems. The book The C Programming Language, co-authored by the original language designer, served for many years as the de facto standard for the language.^[12][1] C has been standardized since 1989 by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and, subsequently, jointly by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

C is an

Since 2000, C has consistently ranked among the top four languages in the TIOBE index, a measure of the popularity of programming languages.^[13]

C is an

• The language has a small, fixed number of keywords, including a full set of control flow primitives: if/else, for, do/while, while, and switch. User-defined names are not distinguished from keywords by any kind of sigil.
• It has a large number of arithmetic,
  bitwise
  , and logic operators: +,+=,++,&,||, etc.
• More than one assignment may be performed in a single statement.
• Functions:
  • Function return values can be ignored, when not needed.
  • Function and data pointers permit ad hoc
    run-time polymorphism
    .
  • Functions may not be defined within the lexical scope of other functions.
  • Variables may be defined within a function, with
    scope
    .
  • A function may call itself, so recursion is supported.
• Data typing is
  implicit conversions
  are possible.
• User-defined (typedef) and compound types are possible.
  • Heterogeneous aggregate data types (struct) allow related data elements to be accessed and assigned as a unit. The contents of whole structs cannot be compared using a single built-in operator (the elements must be compared individually).
  • Union is a structure with overlapping members; it allows multiple data types to share the same memory location.
  • Array indexing is a secondary notation, defined in terms of pointer arithmetic. Whole arrays cannot be assigned or compared using a single built-in operator. There is no "array" keyword in use or definition; instead, square brackets indicate arrays syntactically, for example month[11].
  • Enumerated types are possible with the enum keyword. They are freely interconvertible with integers.
  • Strings are not a distinct data type, but are conventionally implemented as null-terminated character arrays.
• Low-level access to computer memory is possible by converting machine addresses to pointers.
• Procedures
  (subroutines not returning values) are a special case of function, with an empty return type void.
• Memory can be
  library routines
  .
• A preprocessor performs macro definition, source code file inclusion, and conditional compilation.
• There is a basic form of modularity: files can be compiled separately and linked together, with control over which functions and data objects are visible to other files via static and extern attributes.
• Complex functionality such as
  library routines
  .
• The generated code after compilation has relatively straightforward needs on the underlying platform, which makes it suitable for creating operating systems and for use in embedded systems.

While C does not include certain features found in other languages (such as

Many later languages have borrowed directly or indirectly from C, including

The origin of C is closely tied to the development of the Unix operating system, originally implemented in assembly language on a PDP-7 by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, incorporating several ideas from colleagues. Eventually, they decided to port the operating system to a PDP-11. The original PDP-11 version of Unix was also developed in assembly language.^[9]

Thompson wanted a programming language for developing utilities for the new platform. He first tried writing a

In 1971 Ritchie started to improve B, to use the features of the more-powerful PDP-11. A significant addition was a character data type. He called this New B (NB).[15] Thompson started to use NB to write the Unix kernel, and his requirements shaped the direction of the language development.^[15][16] Through to 1972, richer types were added to the NB language: NB had arrays of int and char. Pointers, the ability to generate pointers to other types, arrays of all types, and types to be returned from functions were all also added. Arrays within expressions became pointers. A new compiler was written, and the language was renamed C.^[9]

The C compiler and some utilities made with it were included in

The preprocessor was introduced around 1973 at the urging of Alan Snyder and also in recognition of the usefulness of the file-inclusion mechanisms available in BCPL and PL/I. Its original version provided only included files and simple string replacements: #include and #define of parameterless macros. Soon after that, it was extended, mostly by Mike Lesk and then by John Reiser, to incorporate macros with arguments and conditional compilation.^[9]

Unix was one of the first operating system kernels implemented in a language other than

In 1978 Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie published the first edition of The C Programming Language.^[18] Known as K&R from the initials of its authors, the book served for many years as an informal specification of the language. The version of C that it describes is commonly referred to as "K&R C". As this was released in 1978, it is now also referred to as C78.^[19] The second edition of the book^[20] covers the later ANSI C standard, described below.

K&R introduced several language features:

• Standard I/O library
• long int
  data type
• unsigned int data type
• Compound assignment operators of the form =op (such as =-) were changed to the form op= (that is, -=) to remove the semantic ambiguity created by constructs such as i=-10, which had been interpreted as i =- 10 (decrement i by 10) instead of the possibly intended i = -10 (let i be −10).

Even after the publication of the 1989 ANSI standard, for many years K&R C was still considered the "

In early versions of C, only functions that return types other than int must be declared if used before the function definition; functions used without prior declaration were presumed to return type int.

For example:

long some_function(); /* This is a function declaration, so the compiler can know the name and return type of this function. */
/* int */ other_function(); /* Another function declaration.  Because this is an early version of C, there is an implicit 'int' type here.  A comment shows where the explicit 'int' type specifier would be required in later versions. */

/* int */ calling_function() /* This is a function definition, including the body of the code following in the { curly brackets }. Because no return type is specified, the function implicitly returns an 'int' in this early version of C. */
{
    long test1;
    register /* int */ test2; /* Again, note that 'int' is not required here. The 'int' type specifier */
                              /* in the comment would be required in later versions of C. */
                              /* The 'register' keyword indicates to the compiler that this variable should */
                              /* ideally be stored in a register as opposed to within the stack frame. */
    test1 = some_function();
    if (test1 > 1)
          test2 = 0;
    else
          test2 = other_function();
    return test2;
}

The int type specifiers which are commented out could be omitted in K&R C, but are required in later standards.

Since K&R function declarations did not include any information about function arguments, function parameter

In the years following the publication of K&R C, several features were added to the language, supported by compilers from AT&T (in particular PCC^[21]) and some other vendors. These included:

• void functions (i.e., functions with no return value)
• functions returning
  union
  types (previously only a single pointer, integer or float could be returned)
• assignment for struct data types
• enumerated types (previously, preprocessor definitions for integer fixed values were used, e.g. #define GREEN 3)

The large number of extensions and lack of agreement on a standard library, together with the language popularity and the fact that not even the Unix compilers precisely implemented the K&R specification, led to the necessity of standardization.^[22]

During the late 1970s and 1980s, versions of C were implemented for a wide variety of

In 1983 the

In 1990 the ANSI C standard (with formatting changes) was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO/IEC 9899:1990, which is sometimes called C90. Therefore, the terms "C89" and "C90" refer to the same programming language.

ANSI, like other national standards bodies, no longer develops the C standard independently, but defers to the international C standard, maintained by the working group

One of the aims of the C standardization process was to produce a

After the ANSI/ISO standardization process, the C language specification remained relatively static for several years. In 1995, Normative Amendment 1 to the 1990 C standard (ISO/IEC 9899/AMD1:1995, known informally as C95) was published, to correct some details and to add more extensive support for international character sets.[23]

The C standard was further revised in the late 1990s, leading to the publication of ISO/IEC 9899:1999 in 1999, which is commonly referred to as "C99". It has since been amended three times by Technical Corrigenda.^[24]

C99 introduced several new features, including

In addition, the C99 standard requires support for identifiers using Unicode in the form of escaped characters (e.g. \u0040 or \U0001f431) and suggests support for raw Unicode names.

Work began in 2007 on another revision of the C standard, informally called "C1X" until its official publication of ISO/IEC 9899:2011 on December 8, 2011. The C standards committee adopted guidelines to limit the adoption of new features that had not been tested by existing implementations.

The C11 standard adds numerous new features to C and the library, including type generic macros, anonymous structures, improved Unicode support, atomic operations, multi-threading, and bounds-checked functions. It also makes some portions of the existing C99 library optional, and improves compatibility with C++. The standard macro __STDC_VERSION__ is defined as 201112L to indicate that C11 support is available.

C17 is an informal name for ISO/IEC 9899:2018, a standard for the C programming language published in June 2018. It introduces no new language features, only technical corrections, and clarifications to defects in C11. The standard macro __STDC_VERSION__ is defined as 201710L to indicate that C17 support is available.

C23 is an informal name for the current major C language standard revision. It was informally known as "C2X" through most of its development. C23 was published in October 2024 as ISO/IEC 9899:2024.^[26] The standard macro __STDC_VERSION__ is defined as 202311L to indicate that C23 support is available.

C2Y is an informal name for the next major C language standard revision, after C23 (C2X), that is hoped to be released later in the 2020s decade, hence the '2' in "C2Y". An early working draft of C2Y was released in February 2024 as N3220 by the working group

Historically, embedded C programming requires non-standard extensions to the C language to support exotic features such as fixed-point arithmetic, multiple distinct memory banks, and basic I/O operations.

In 2008, the C Standards Committee published a technical report extending the C language^[28] to address these issues by providing a common standard for all implementations to adhere to. It includes a number of features not available in normal C, such as fixed-point arithmetic, named address spaces, and basic I/O hardware addressing.

C has a formal grammar specified by the C standard.^[29] Line endings are generally not significant in C; however, line boundaries do have significance during the preprocessing phase. Comments may appear either between the delimiters /* and */, or (since C99) following // until the end of the line. Comments delimited by /* and */ do not nest, and these sequences of characters are not interpreted as comment delimiters if they appear inside string or character literals.^[30]

C source files contain declarations and function definitions. Function definitions, in turn, contain declarations and statements. Declarations either define new types using keywords such as struct, union, and enum, or assign types to and perhaps reserve storage for new variables, usually by writing the type followed by the variable name. Keywords such as char and int specify built-in types. Sections of code are enclosed in braces ({ and }, sometimes called "curly brackets") to limit the scope of declarations and to act as a single statement for control structures.

As an imperative language, C uses statements to specify actions. The most common statement is an expression statement, consisting of an expression to be evaluated, followed by a semicolon; as a side effect of the evaluation, functions may be called and variables assigned new values. To modify the normal sequential execution of statements, C provides several control-flow statements identified by reserved keywords. Structured programming is supported by if ... [else] conditional execution and by do ... while, while, and for iterative execution (looping). The for statement has separate initialization, testing, and reinitialization expressions, any or all of which can be omitted. break and continue can be used within the loop. Break is used to leave the innermost enclosing loop statement and continue is used to skip to its reinitialisation. There is also a non-structured goto statement which branches directly to the designated label within the function. switch selects a case to be executed based on the value of an integer expression. Different from many other languages, control-flow will fall through to the next case unless terminated by a break.

Expressions can use a variety of built-in operators and may contain function calls. The order in which arguments to functions and operands to most operators are evaluated is unspecified. The evaluations may even be interleaved. However, all side effects (including storage to variables) will occur before the next "

Kernighan and Ritchie say in the Introduction of The C Programming Language: "C, like any other language, has its blemishes. Some of the operators have the wrong precedence; some parts of the syntax could be better."[31] The C standard did not attempt to correct many of these blemishes, because of the impact of such changes on already existing software.

The basic C source character set includes the following characters:

• Lowercase and uppercase letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet: a–z, A–Z
• Decimal digits: 0–9
• Graphic characters: ! " # % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? [ \ ] ^ _ { | } ~
• form feed, newline

Additional multi-byte encoded characters may be used in string literals, but they are not entirely portable. The latest C standard (C11) allows multi-national Unicode characters to be embedded portably within C source text by using \uXXXX or \UXXXXXXXX encoding (where X denotes a hexadecimal character), although this feature is not yet widely implemented.^{[needs update]}

The basic C execution character set contains the same characters, along with representations for

The following reserved words are

C89 has 32 reserved words, also known as 'keywords', which cannot be used for any purposes other than those for which they are predefined:

C99 added five more reserved words: (‡ indicates an alternative spelling alias for a C23 keyword)

C11 added seven more reserved words:^[32] (‡ indicates an alternative spelling alias for a C23 keyword)

C23 reserved fifteen more words:

Most of the recently reserved words begin with an underscore followed by a capital letter, because identifiers of that form were previously reserved by the C standard for use only by implementations. Since existing program source code should not have been using these identifiers, it would not be affected when C implementations started supporting these extensions to the programming language. Some standard headers do define more convenient synonyms for underscored identifiers. Some of those words were added as keywords with their conventional spelling in C23 and the corresponding macros were removed.

Prior to C89, entry was reserved as a keyword. In the second edition of their book The C Programming Language, which describes what became known as C89, Kernighan and Ritchie wrote, "The ... [keyword] entry, formerly reserved but never used, is no longer reserved." and "The stillborn entry keyword is withdrawn."^[33]

C supports a rich set of operators, which are symbols used within an expression to specify the manipulations to be performed while evaluating that expression. C has operators for:

• %
• assignment: =
• augmented assignment: +=, -=, *=, /=, %=, &=, |=, ^=, <<=, >>=
• bitwise logic
  : ~, &, |, ^
• bitwise shifts
  : <<, >>
• Boolean logic
  : !, &&, ||
• ? :
• equality testing: ==, !=
• calling functions
  : ( )
• increment and decrement: ++, --
• member selection: ., ->
• object size: sizeof
• type: typeof, typeof_unqual since C23
• order relations
  : <, <=, >, >=
• reference and dereference: &, *, [ ]
• sequencing: ,
• subexpression grouping: ( )
• type conversion: (typename)

C uses the operator = (used in mathematics to express equality) to indicate assignment, following the precedent of Fortran and PL/I, but unlike ALGOL and its derivatives. C uses the operator == to test for equality. The similarity between the operators for assignment and equality may result in the accidental use of one in place of the other, and in many cases the mistake does not produce an error message (although some compilers produce warnings). For example, the conditional expression if (a == b + 1) might mistakenly be written as if (a = b + 1), which will be evaluated as true unless the value of a is 0 after the assignment.^[34]

The C

The "hello, world" example that appeared in the first edition of

, which is usually a terminal or screen display.

The original version was:^[36]

main()
{
    printf("hello, world\n");
}

A standard-conforming "hello, world" program is:^[a]

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
    printf("hello, world\n");
}

The first line of the program contains a

stdio.h

header file, which contains declarations for standard input and output functions such as printf and scanf. The angle brackets surrounding stdio.h indicate that the header file can be located using a search strategy that prefers headers provided with the compiler to other headers having the same name (as opposed to double quotes which typically include local or project-specific header files).

The second line indicates that a function named main is being defined. The

run-time environment calls the main function to begin program execution. The type specifier int indicates that the value returned to the invoker (in this case the run-time environment) as a result of evaluating the main function, is an integer. The keyword void as a parameter list indicates that the main function takes no arguments.[b]

The opening curly brace indicates the beginning of the code that defines the main function.

The next line of the program is a statement that calls (i.e. diverts execution to) a function named printf, which in this case is supplied from a system library. In this call, the printf function is passed (i.e. provided with) a single argument, which is the address of the first character in the string literal "hello, world\n". The string literal is an unnamed array set up automatically by the compiler, with elements of type char and a final NULL character (ASCII value 0) marking the end of the array (to allow printf to determine the length of the string). The NULL character can also be written as the escape sequence \0. The \n is a standard escape sequence that C translates to a newline character, which, on output, signifies the end of the current line. The return value of the printf function is of type int, but it is silently discarded since it is not used. (A more careful program might test the return value to check that the printf function succeeded.) The semicolon ; terminates the statement.

The closing curly brace indicates the end of the code for the main function. According to the C99 specification and newer, the main function (unlike any other function) will implicitly return a value of 0 upon reaching the } that terminates the function.^[c] The return value of 0 is interpreted by the run-time system as an exit code indicating successful execution of the function.^[37]

Data types

Main article: C data types

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The

unions

(union).

C is often used in low-level systems programming where escapes from the type system may be necessary. The compiler attempts to ensure type correctness of most expressions, but the programmer can override the checks in various ways, either by using a type cast to explicitly convert a value from one type to another, or by using pointers or unions to reinterpret the underlying bits of a data object in some other way.

Some find C's declaration syntax unintuitive, particularly for

declaration reflects use".)^[39]

C's usual arithmetic conversions allow for efficient code to be generated, but can sometimes produce unexpected results. For example, a comparison of signed and unsigned integers of equal width requires a conversion of the signed value to unsigned. This can generate unexpected results if the signed value is negative.

Pointers

C supports the use of

pointer arithmetic

. The run-time representation of a pointer value is typically a raw memory address (perhaps augmented by an offset-within-word field), but since a pointer's type includes the type of the thing pointed to, expressions including pointers can be type-checked at compile time. Pointer arithmetic is automatically scaled by the size of the pointed-to data type.

Pointers are used for many purposes in C.

event handlers.^[37]

A null pointer value explicitly points to no valid location. Dereferencing a null pointer value is undefined, often resulting in a segmentation fault. Null pointer values are useful for indicating special cases such as no "next" pointer in the final node of a linked list, or as an error indication from functions returning pointers. In appropriate contexts in source code, such as for assigning to a pointer variable, a null pointer constant can be written as 0, with or without explicit casting to a pointer type, as the NULL macro defined by several standard headers or, since C23 with the constant nullptr. In conditional contexts, null pointer values evaluate to false, while all other pointer values evaluate to true.

Void pointers (void *) point to objects of unspecified type, and can therefore be used as "generic" data pointers. Since the size and type of the pointed-to object is not known, void pointers cannot be dereferenced, nor is pointer arithmetic on them allowed, although they can easily be (and in many contexts implicitly are) converted to and from any other object pointer type.^[37]

Careless use of pointers is potentially dangerous. Because they are typically unchecked, a pointer variable can be made to point to any arbitrary location, which can cause undesirable effects. Although properly used pointers point to safe places, they can be made to point to unsafe places by using invalid

wild pointers); or they may be directly assigned an unsafe value using a cast, union, or through another corrupt pointer. In general, C is permissive in allowing manipulation of and conversion between pointer types, although compilers typically provide options for various levels of checking. Some other programming languages address these problems by using more restrictive reference

types.

Arrays

See also: C string handling

Array types in C are traditionally of a fixed, static size specified at compile time. The more recent C99 standard also allows a form of variable-length arrays. However, it is also possible to allocate a block of memory (of arbitrary size) at run-time, using the standard library's malloc function, and treat it as an array.

Since arrays are always accessed (in effect) via pointers, array accesses are typically not checked against the underlying array size, although some compilers may provide

buffer overruns

, and run-time exceptions.

C does not have a special provision for declaring

row-major order. Multi-dimensional arrays are commonly used in numerical algorithms (mainly from applied linear algebra

) to store matrices. The structure of the C array is well suited to this particular task. However, in early versions of C the bounds of the array must be known fixed values or else explicitly passed to any subroutine that requires them, and dynamically sized arrays of arrays cannot be accessed using double indexing. (A workaround for this was to allocate the array with an additional "row vector" of pointers to the columns.) C99 introduced "variable-length arrays" which address this issue.

The following example using modern C (C99 or later) shows allocation of a two-dimensional array on the heap and the use of multi-dimensional array indexing for accesses (which can use bounds-checking on many C compilers):

int func(int N, int M)
{
  float (*p)[N] [M] = malloc(sizeof *p);
  if (p == 0)
    return -1;
  for (int i = 0; i < N; i++)
    for (int j = 0; j < M; j++)
      (*p)[i] [j] = i + j;
  print_array(N, M, p);
  free(p);
  return 1;
}

And here is a similar implementation using C99's Auto

VLA feature:^[d]

int func(int N, int M)
{
  // Caution: checks should be made to ensure N*M*sizeof(float) does NOT exceed limitations for auto VLAs and is within available size of stack.
  float p[N] [M]; // auto VLA is held on the stack, and sized when the function is invoked
  for (int i = 0; i < N; i++)
    for (int j = 0; j < M; j++)
      p[i] [j] = i + j;
  print_array(N, M, p);
  // no need to free(p) since it will disappear when the function exits, along with the rest of the stack frame
  return 1;
}

Array–pointer interchangeability

The subscript notation x[i] (where x designates a pointer) is syntactic sugar for *(x+i).^[42] Taking advantage of the compiler's knowledge of the pointer type, the address that x + i points to is not the base address (pointed to by x) incremented by i bytes, but rather is defined to be the base address incremented by i multiplied by the size of an element that x points to. Thus, x[i] designates the i+1th element of the array.

Furthermore, in most expression contexts (a notable exception is as operand of

pass-by-value semantics, arrays are in effect passed by reference

.

The total size of an array x can be determined by applying sizeof to an expression of array type. The size of an element can be determined by applying the operator sizeof to any dereferenced element of an array A, as in n = sizeof A[0]. Thus, the number of elements in a declared array A can be determined as sizeof A / sizeof A[0]. Note, that if only a pointer to the first element is available as it is often the case in C code because of the automatic conversion described above, the information about the full type of the array and its length are lost.

Memory management

One of the most important functions of a programming language is to provide facilities for managing memory and the objects that are stored in memory. C provides three principal ways to allocate memory for objects:^[37]

• extent
  (or lifetime) as long as the binary which contains them is loaded into memory.
• Automatic memory allocation: temporary objects can be stored on the stack
  , and this space is automatically freed and reusable after the block in which they are declared is exited.
• Dynamic memory allocation: blocks of memory of arbitrary size can be requested at run-time using library functions such as malloc from a region of memory called the heap; these blocks persist until subsequently freed for reuse by calling the library function realloc or free.

These three approaches are appropriate in different situations and have various trade-offs. For example, static memory allocation has little allocation overhead, automatic allocation may involve slightly more overhead, and dynamic memory allocation can potentially have a great deal of overhead for both allocation and deallocation. The persistent nature of static objects is useful for maintaining state information across function calls, automatic allocation is easy to use but stack space is typically much more limited and transient than either static memory or heap space, and dynamic memory allocation allows convenient allocation of objects whose size is known only at run-time. Most C programs make extensive use of all three.

Where possible, automatic or static allocation is usually simplest because the storage is managed by the compiler, freeing the programmer of the potentially error-prone chore of manually allocating and releasing storage. However, many data structures can change in size at runtime, and since static allocations (and automatic allocations before C99) must have a fixed size at compile-time, there are many situations in which dynamic allocation is necessary.^[37] Prior to the C99 standard, variable-sized arrays were a common example of this. (See the article on C dynamic memory allocation for an example of dynamically allocated arrays.) Unlike automatic allocation, which can fail at run time with uncontrolled consequences, the dynamic allocation functions return an indication (in the form of a null pointer value) when the required storage cannot be allocated. (Static allocation that is too large is usually detected by the linker or loader, before the program can even begin execution.)

Unless otherwise specified, static objects contain zero or null pointer values upon program startup. Automatically and dynamically allocated objects are initialized only if an initial value is explicitly specified; otherwise they initially have indeterminate values (typically, whatever

storage, which might not even represent a valid value for that type). If the program attempts to access an uninitialized value, the results are undefined. Many modern compilers try to detect and warn about this problem, but both false positives and false negatives

can occur.

Heap memory allocation has to be synchronized with its actual usage in any program to be reused as much as possible. For example, if the only pointer to a heap memory allocation goes out of scope or has its value overwritten before it is deallocated explicitly, then that memory cannot be recovered for later reuse and is essentially lost to the program, a phenomenon known as a

automatic garbage collection

.

Libraries

The C programming language uses

compiler flags (e.g., -lm, shorthand for "link the math library").^[37]

The most common C library is the

ISO and ANSI C standards and comes with every C implementation (implementations which target limited environments such as embedded systems

may provide only a subset of the standard library). This library supports stream input and output, memory allocation, mathematics, character strings, and time values. Several separate standard headers (for example, stdio.h) specify the interfaces for these and other standard library facilities.

Another common set of C library functions are those used by applications specifically targeted for Unix and Unix-like systems, especially functions which provide an interface to the kernel. These functions are detailed in various standards such as POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification.

Since many programs have been written in C, there are a wide variety of other libraries available. Libraries are often written in C because C compilers generate efficient object code; programmers then create interfaces to the library so that the routines can be used from higher-level languages like Java, Perl, and Python.^[37]

File handling and streams

File input and output (I/O) is not part of the C language itself but instead is handled by libraries (such as the C standard library) and their associated header files (e.g. stdio.h). File handling is generally implemented through high-level I/O which works through

embedded programming

). With few exceptions, implementations include low-level I/O.

Language tools

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A number of tools have been developed to help C programmers find and fix statements with undefined behavior or possibly erroneous expressions, with greater rigor than that provided by the compiler. The tool lint was the first such, leading to many others.

Automated source code checking and auditing are beneficial in any language, and for C many such tools exist, such as Lint. A common practice is to use Lint to detect questionable code when a program is first written. Once a program passes Lint, it is then compiled using the C compiler. Also, many compilers can optionally warn about syntactically valid constructs that are likely to actually be errors. MISRA C is a proprietary set of guidelines to avoid such questionable code, developed for embedded systems.^[43]

There are also compilers, libraries, and operating system level mechanisms for performing actions that are not a standard part of C, such as

automatic garbage collection

.

Tools such as

memory allocation functions can help uncover runtime errors in memory usage.^[44][45]

Uses

Rationale for use in systems programming

C is widely used for systems programming in implementing operating systems and embedded system applications.^[46] This is for several reasons:

• The C language permits platform hardware and memory to be accessed with pointers and
  I/O registers
  ) can be configured and used with code written in C – it allows fullest control of the platform it is running on.
• The code generated after compilation does not demand many system features, and can be invoked from some boot code in a straightforward manner – it is simple to execute.
• The C language statements and expressions typically map well on to sequences of instructions for the target processor, and consequently there is a low
  run-time
  demand on system resources – it is fast to execute.
• With its rich set of operators, the C language can use many of the features of target CPUs. Where a particular CPU has more esoteric instructions, a language variant can be constructed with perhaps intrinsic functions to exploit those instructions – it can use practically all the target CPU's features.
• The language makes it easy to overlay structures onto blocks of binary data, allowing the data to be comprehended, navigated and modified – it can write data structures, even file systems.
• The language supports a rich set of operators, including bit manipulation, for integer arithmetic and logic, and perhaps different sizes of floating point numbers – it can process appropriately-structured data effectively.
• C is a fairly small language, with only a handful of statements, and without too many features that generate extensive target code – it is comprehensible.
• C has direct control over memory allocation and deallocation, which gives reasonable efficiency and predictable timing to memory-handling operations, without any concerns for sporadic
  stop-the-world
  garbage collection events – it has predictable performance.
• C permits the use and implementation of different
  OS kernel that may suit DMA, use within interrupt handlers, or integrated with the virtual memory
  system.
• Depending on the linker and environment, C code can also call libraries written in assembly language, and may be called from assembly language – it interoperates well with other lower-level code.
• C and its calling conventions and linker structures are commonly used in conjunction with other high-level languages, with calls both to C and from C supported – it interoperates well with other high-level code.
• C has a very mature and broad ecosystem, including libraries, frameworks, open source compilers, debuggers and utilities, and is the de facto standard. It is likely the drivers already exist in C, or that there is a similar CPU architecture as a back-end of a C compiler, so there is reduced incentive to choose another language.

Used for computationally-intensive libraries

C enables programmers to create efficient implementations of algorithms and data structures, because the layer of abstraction from hardware is thin, and its overhead is low, an important criterion for computationally intensive programs. For example, the

Mathematica, and MATLAB are completely or partially written in C. Many languages support calling library functions in C, for example, the Python-based framework NumPy

uses C for the high-performance and hardware-interacting aspects.

C as an intermediate language

C is sometimes used as an

C-based languages specifically designed for use as intermediate languages, such as C--. Also, contemporary major compilers GCC and LLVM both feature an intermediate representation

that is not C, and those compilers support front ends for many languages including C.

Other languages written in C

A consequence of C's wide availability and efficiency is that compilers, libraries and interpreters of other programming languages are often implemented in C.^[47] For example, the reference implementations of Python,^[48] Perl,^[49] Ruby,^[50] and PHP^[51] are written in C.

Once used for web development

Historically, C was sometimes used for

interpreted languages because of its speed, stability, and near-universal availability.^[53] It is no longer common practice for web development to be done in C,^[54] and many other web development tools

exist.

Web servers

The two most popular web servers, Apache HTTP Server and Nginx, are both written in C. These web servers interact with the operating system, listen on TCP ports for HTTP requests, and then serve up static web content, or cause the execution of other languages handling to 'render' content such as PHP, which is itself primarily written in C. C's close-to-the-metal approach allows for the construction of these high-performance software systems.

End-user applications

C has also been widely used to implement

end-user applications.^[55]

However, such applications can also be written in newer, higher-level languages.

Limitations

the power of assembly language and the convenience of ... assembly language

— Dennis Ritchie[56]

While C has been popular, influential and hugely successful, it has drawbacks, including:

• The standard dynamic memory handling with malloc and free is error prone. Bugs include: Memory leaks when memory is allocated but not freed; and access to previously freed memory.
• The use of pointers and the direct manipulation of memory means corruption of memory is possible, perhaps due to programmer error, or insufficient checking of bad data.
• There is some
  type checking, but it does not apply to areas like variadic functions, and the type checking can be trivially or inadvertently circumvented. It is weakly typed
  .
• Since the code generated by the compiler contains few checks itself, there is a burden on the programmer to consider all possible outcomes, to protect against buffer overruns, array bounds checking, stack overflows, memory exhaustion, and consider race conditions, thread isolation, etc.
• The use of pointers and the run-time manipulation of these means there may be two ways to access the same data (aliasing), which is not determinable at compile time. This means that some optimisations that may be available to other languages are not possible in C. FORTRAN is considered faster.
• Some of the standard library functions, e.g. scanf or strncat, can lead to buffer overruns.
• There is limited standardisation in support for low-level variants in generated code, for example: different function calling conventions and ABI; different structure packing conventions; different byte ordering within larger integers (including endianness). In many language implementations, some of these options may be handled with the preprocessor directive #pragma,^[57][58] and some with additional keywords e.g. use __cdecl calling convention. But the directive and options are not consistently supported.^[59]
• String handling using the standard library is code-intensive, with explicit memory management required.
• The language does not directly support object orientation, introspection, run-time expression evaluation, generics, etc.
• There are few guards against inappropriate use of language features, which may lead to unmaintainable code. In particular, the C preprocessor can hide troubling effects such as double evaluation and worse.^[60] This facility for tricky code has been celebrated with competitions such as the International Obfuscated C Code Contest and the Underhanded C Contest.
• C lacks standard support for
  return codes for error checking. The setjmp and longjmp standard library functions have been used^[61]
  to implement a try-catch mechanism via macros.

For some purposes, restricted styles of C have been adopted, e.g.

CERT C, in an attempt to reduce the opportunity for bugs. Databases such as CWE

attempt to count the ways C etc. has vulnerabilities, along with recommendations for mitigation.

There are tools that can mitigate against some of the drawbacks. Contemporary C compilers include checks which may generate warnings to help identify many potential bugs.

Related languages

Main article: List of C-family programming languages

C has both directly and indirectly influenced many later languages such as C++ and Java.^[63] The most pervasive influence has been syntactical; all of the languages mentioned combine the statement and (more or less recognizably) expression syntax of C with type systems, data models or large-scale program structures that differ from those of C, sometimes radically.

Several C or near-C interpreters exist, including Ch and CINT, which can also be used for scripting.

When object-oriented programming languages became popular, C++ and Objective-C were two different extensions of C that provided object-oriented capabilities. Both languages were originally implemented as source-to-source compilers; source code was translated into C, and then compiled with a C compiler.^[64]

The

Classes") was devised by Bjarne Stroustrup as an approach to providing object-oriented functionality with a C-like syntax.^[65] C++ adds greater typing strength, scoping, and other tools useful in object-oriented programming, and permits generic programming via templates. Nearly a superset of C, C++ now^[when?] supports most of C, with a few exceptions

.

superset of C that permits object-oriented programming using a hybrid dynamic/static typing paradigm. Objective-C derives its syntax from both C and Smalltalk

: syntax that involves preprocessing, expressions, function declarations, and function calls is inherited from C, while the syntax for object-oriented features was originally taken from Smalltalk.

In addition to C++ and Objective-C, Ch, Cilk, and Unified Parallel C are nearly supersets of C.

See also

• Compatibility of C and C++
• Comparison of Pascal and C
• Comparison of programming languages
• International Obfuscated C Code Contest
• List of C-family programming languages
• List of C compilers

Notes

1. ^ The original example code will compile on most modern compilers that are not in strict standard compliance mode, but it does not fully conform to the requirements of either C89 or C99. In fact, C99 requires that a diagnostic message be produced.
2. command-line arguments
   . The ISO C standard (section 5.1.2.2.1) requires both forms of main to be supported, which is special treatment not afforded to any other function.
3. ^ Prior to C99, an explicit return 0; statement was required at the end of the main function.
4. ^ Code of print_array (not shown) slightly differs,^[why?] too.

References

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31. ^ Kernighan & Ritchie (1978), p. 3.
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Sources

• doi:10.1145/155360.155580
  .
  • By courtesy of the author, also at Ritchie, Dennis M. "Chistory". www.bell-labs.com. Retrieved March 29, 2022.
• Ritchie, Dennis M. (1993). "The Development of the C Language". The Second ACM SIGPLAN Conference on History of Programming Languages (HOPL-II).
  ISBN 0-89791-570-4. Archived from the original
  on April 11, 2019. Retrieved November 4, 2014.
• ISBN 0-13-110362-8
  .

Further reading

• ISBN 978-0131315099. (source)
• Banahan, M.; Brady, D.; Doran, M. (1991). The C Book: Featuring the ANSI C Standard (2 ed.). Addison-Wesley.
  ISBN 978-0201544336. (free)
• Feuer, Alan R. (1985). The C Puzzle Book (1 ed.). Prentice Hall.
  ISBN 0131099345
  .
• Harbison, Samuel; Steele, Guy Jr. (2002). C: A Reference Manual (5 ed.). Pearson.
  ISBN 978-0130895929. (archive)
• King, K.N. (2008). C Programming: A Modern Approach (2 ed.). W. W. Norton.
  ISBN 978-0393979503. (archive)
• Griffiths, David; Griffiths, Dawn (2012). Head First C (1 ed.). O'Reilly.
  ISBN 978-1449399917
  .
• Perry, Greg; Miller, Dean (2013). C Programming: Absolute Beginner's Guide (3 ed.). Que.
  ISBN 978-0789751980
  .
• Deitel, Paul; Deitel, Harvey (2015). C: How to Program (8 ed.). Pearson.
  ISBN 978-0133976892
  .
• Gustedt, Jens (2019). Modern C (2 ed.). Manning.
  ISBN 978-1617295812. (free)

External links

• ISO C Working Group official website
  • ISO/IEC 9899, publicly available official C documents, including the C99 Rationale
  • "C99 with Technical corrigenda TC1, TC2, and TC3 included" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on October 25, 2007. (3.61 MB)
• comp.lang.c Frequently Asked Questions
• A History of C, by Dennis Ritchie
• C Library Reference and Examples