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Learn C Fundamentals

Virtues and Challenges

Explore the virtues and challenges of C programming to understand why this language remains important. Learn about its fast performance, portability, minimal memory footprint, and flexibility through low-level access. Understand the difficulties of manual memory management, lack of runtime checks, and the need to master C's APIs. This lesson helps you weigh C's strengths and weaknesses to know when it is the preferred choice.

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Pros and cons of programming in C

Every language has some strong points, but no language is perfect. Let’s see why this is true for C.

Virtues of C language

  • Fast: C is fast. It is a compiled language, close to the machine hardware, and doesn’t require any intermediary to interpret each line of code.

  • Portable: Because of its popularity, a compiler exists for just about any hardware platform. This makes it possible to port your code to any platform.

  • Small memory footprint: Its compiled nature, minimal runtime environment, and lack of extensive object-oriented features generally give it a smaller memory footprint than languages like C++ and Python.

  • Low-level access: C programmers have direct access to memory and low-level system features as needed. This gives a lot of flexibility and fine-grained control to the programmer.

  • Strong ecosystem: It is one of the old languages. Because of this, it has matured over time. It has a vibrant community, with a strong ecosystem, lots of resources, and a combined experience available.

  • Availability of tools: Several tools have been developed to make programming easier. These include various development environments, and compilation, debugging, and optimization tools.

Challenges associated with C

  • Memory management: Memory has to be managed explicitly, and a C programmer needs to be mindful of how memory is used behind the scenes.

  • Minimal runtime checking: As C allows direct memory access and does not enforce runtime checking, it’s easy to get into trouble when programming in C.

  • Mastering the APIs: Although the language is small, many APIs and libraries must be mastered to become an effective C programmer.

  • The compile-test-debug cycle: Each piece of code has a compile-test (crash)-debug cycle. Even though the compiled code runs fast, there is a flip side to it as well, since each minor modification requires a time-consuming recompilation, unlike interpreted languages like Python.

  • Object-oriented programming: It does not support object-oriented programming.

  • Verbose code: The code is usually more verbose than in high-level languages like Python.

Now that we know C’s strengths and weaknesses, it’s time to examine some specific scenarios in which it’s preferred over the other languages.