The C Programming Language
Click "run" below to see C in action!Classic
Of Enduring Value
Developed by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson for UNIX in 1969, C is almost 50 years old.Universal
Across the Universe
It's in your Operating System. It's in Airplanes and Trains. It's in your Microwave Oven.
C was developed in order to rewrite the original UNIX for PDP-11. Its development began in 1972, when a large part of UNIX was rewritten in C.
Since then, ANSI standards for C were introduced with many features that are still in use today.
Although C has a decreasing trend where developers are more in favor of higher level languages, it is still crucial to almost everything that a modern computer does. It even has a more popular descendant—C++.
C is widely used in Systems Programming and Embedded applications. Many compilers and interpreters (for Python, Ruby, Perl, Lua, etc.) are implemented in C due to its superior efficiency.
At the moment, there exists more than 60 programming languages that are based on C.
A listing of well-known projects implemented in C:
