MZOS: IS C STILL RELEVANT IN 2015?

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IS C STILL RELEVANT IN 2015?

Dennis Ritchie devised C as far back as 1972 and many programming languages have come and gone since then. But C, notwithstanding its three major revisions and the passage of time, has still stood ground. Large chunks of Windows and Linux were written in this language. It is still believed by many authorities to be a great language for back-end programming, in spite of more modern languages like C++, Java or even Erlang or Ruby. It’s raw performance and reliability is still applauded and even in this day and age, in the year 2015, C is considered one of the best computer languages ever devised for the following distinct reasons:

1. Easy to Learn

Once you have grasped the only advanced features of C i.e. pointers and function pointers, you have pretty much mastered the language. The rest will be a piece of cake. Further, higher-level languages like C++, Objective-C, Python, Java, C# and Perl use block syntax derived from C and coding in these will be easy to understand after an extensive C experience.

2. Simplicity

C is very often called a ‘weak’ language, but this weakness is in fact its virtue. This statistically typed language has a very simple type system and the surface areas of its application programme interface are small. The lack of massive frameworks means a strong inclination to create small libraries that are light.

3. Tight Coding

In this age of low-cost processors with small amounts of RAM and ROM, C provides tight coding.

4. Expressiveness

It’s the expressiveness of the syntax and semantics of C that is extremely appealing to high-level algorithms and low-level hardware simultaneously. The powerful expressiveness and simplicity of C lets the programmer focus on more important aspects of the code, rather than taking a high cognitive load.

5. Internet Use

C-based applications are what is running the internet. Though most browsers are written in C++, C language is used for its infrastructure, DNS utilities, mail sending features, etc.It also makes the job of compiler-writers simple since they don’t have to create a code generation stage for each platform by generating C as an output stage.

6. Speed and Memory

C is undoubtedly the fastest language for programming. It’s not only fast in runtime, but also efficient in terms of memory consumption and startup time.

7. Painless Debugging

Debugging can be a painful process, especially when an error was made days ago and you can’t figure out its exact position in the ridiculously long code that you have written. With its stacks, variables, arguments, thread locals, globals, and basically everything in memory placed for you to see, debugging is not as bad a process as it would be in a higher-level language.

8. Still in Use

Many software are available that are written in C, like Apache and NGINX Web servers, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Ingres database, GIMP, CPython, Perl 5, PHP, Mathematica, MATLAB and most device drivers.

9. Fast Development Cycle

The development cycle is basically the ‘Build-Run-Debug’ cycle of a code and it’s critical for

this cycle to be fast for reasons of enhanced efficiency and productivity. C has the fastest development interactivity of any mainstream statistically typed language, making the cycle very fast.

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