Outline of the C programming language

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The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to C:

C is a general-purpose, procedural, compiled, and statically typed programming language. It was created by Dennis Ritchie in 1972 at Bell Labs as a successor to the B language.

What type of language is C?

C can be described as all of the following:

• Programming language — artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer.
• Compiled language — language implemented through compilers rather than interpreters
• Procedural programming language — programming paradigm based on the concept of procedure calls
• General-purpose programming language — designed for writing software in a wide variety of application domains
• Statically typed programming language — type checking is performed at compile-time

History of C

• B programming language — precursor to C
• K&R C — early version described by Kernighan and Ritchie
• ANSI C / ISO C standards:
  • C89/C90
  • C99
  • C11
  • C17
  • C23 — current standard

General C concepts

Issues / Limitations

• Constructs that behave differently in C and C++
• Cyber security
• Undefined behavior

C Toolchain

Notable projects written in C

• CPython — the reference implementation of the Python programming language
• Git — version control system
• The Linux kernel
• Bash, Coreutils, Autoconf and other command line utilities
• Lua, PHP, Perl — Scripting languages
• PostgreSQL — relational database systems
• Redis — in-memory database
• SQLite — embedded SQL database engine
• Unix — originally rewritten in C at Bell Labs
• Vim
• GNOME, MATE and Xfce — desktop environments
• X window system and Wayland — windowing systems
• Apache HTTP Server and nginx — Web servers
• cURL — command line web client and library
• HAProxy — multiprotocol load balancer and reverse proxy
• OpenSSH
• OpenSSL
• OpenLDAP

Example source code

• Articles with example C code

C publications

C programmers

• John Carmack – game programmer, known for Doom and Quake.
• Brian Kernighan — wrote The C Programming Language book
• Rob Pike – worked on Unix and Plan 9, contributed to C and its ecosystem.
• Dennis Ritchie — created the C programming language
• Richard Stallman – founder of the GNU Project
• Tim Sweeney – founder of Epic Games and creator of Unreal Engine
• Ken Thompson — Unix
• Linus Torvalds — Linux

C dialects

• Cyclone — safe variant
• Embedded C
• GNU C — features specific to GCC
• K&R C
• Microsoft C — Microsoft-specific extensions
• Objective-C — object-oriented extension of C

C learning resources

• Codecademy – interactive C programming lessons
• GeeksforGeeks – tutorials, coding examples, and interactive programming for C concepts and data structures
• Learn-C.org – free interactive C tutorial for beginners
• CProgramming.com Tutorial – tutorials, examples, and best practices for learning C
• W3Schools – beginner-friendly C tutorials
• Wikibooks C Programming – free open-content textbook

See also

• Compatibility of C and C++
• List of software programming journals
• List of C-family programming languages
• Outline of computer programming
• Outline of software
• Outline of software engineering

References

External links

• ISO C standard information
• C reference on cppreference.com