C (programming language)
C (pronounced /ˈsiː/ – like the letter c)[6] is a general-purpose computer 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, device drivers, and protocol stacks, but its use in application software has been decreasing.[7] C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems.
Not to be confused with C++ or C#.Paradigm
ANSI X3J11 (ANSI C); ISO/IEC JTC 1 (Joint Technical Committee 1) / SC 22 (Subcommittee 22) / WG 14 (Working Group 14) (ISO C)
1972[2]
.c, .h
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.[8] During the 1980s, C gradually gained popularity. It has become one of the most widely used programming languages,[9][10] 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.[11][1] C has been standardized since 1989 by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
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.
Since 2000, C has consistently ranked among the top two languages in the TIOBE index, a measure of the popularity of programming languages.[12]
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:[35]
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.[35] Prior to the C99 standard, variable-sized arrays were a common example of this. (See the article on malloc 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 bit pattern happens to be present in the 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 memory leak. Conversely, it is possible for memory to be freed, but is referenced subsequently, leading to unpredictable results. Typically, the failure symptoms appear in a portion of the program unrelated to the code that causes the error, making it difficult to diagnose the failure. Such issues are ameliorated in languages with automatic garbage collection.
While C has been popular, influential and hugely successful, it has drawbacks, including:
For some purposes, restricted styles of C have been adopted, e.g. MISRA C or 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.
Some of these drawbacks have prompted the construction of other languages.