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C (programming language) - Wikipedia

C (programming language)

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C1 is a general-purpose programming language created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie. By design, C gives the programmer relatively direct access to the features of the typical CPU architecture, customized for the target instruction set. It has been and continues to be used to implement operating systems (especially kernels2), device drivers, and protocol stacks, but its use in application software has been decreasing.3 C is used on computers 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.4 During the 1980s, C gradually gained popularity. It has become one of the most widely used programming languages,56 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.7[^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 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.

Although neither C nor its standard library provide some popular features found in other languages, it is flexible enough to support them. For example, object orientation and garbage collection are provided by external libraries GLib Object System and Boehm garbage collector, respectively.

Since 2000, C has typically ranked as the most or second-most popular language in the TIOBE index.8

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. Pronounced/ˈsiː/, like the letter ‘c’. ↩

  2. Munoz, Daniel. “After All These Years, the World is Still Powered by C Programming | Toptal”. Toptal Engineering Blog. Retrieved June 15, 2024. ↩

  3. “C Language Drops to Lowest Popularity Rating”. Developer.com. August 9, 2016. Archived from the original on August 22, 2022. Retrieved August 1, 2022. ↩

  4. Ritchie (1993a). ↩

  5. “Programming Language Popularity”. 2009. Archived from the original on January 16, 2009. Retrieved January 16, 2009. ↩

  6. “TIOBE Programming Community Index”. 2009. Archived from the original on May 4, 2009. Retrieved May 6, 2009. ↩

  7. Ward, Terry A. (August 1983). “Annotated C/A Bibliography of the C Language”. Byte. p. 268. Retrieved January 31, 2015. ↩

  8. “TIOBE Index for September 2024”. Archived from the original on September 18, 2024. Retrieved December 16, 2025. ↩

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