When Should I Use C?

As we learned in the previous lesson, C has an edge over many languages in that it’s fast, has fine-grained access to the system, and has a small memory footprint. This makes C a language of choice for scientific applications, system programming, and Internet of Things (IoT) devicesThese refer to physical devices connected to the internet and can collect, send, or receive data. For example, the smoke detector at your home that can send alerts to your mobile phone and the fitness monitor that you wear and that automatically syncs with your computer are all IoT devices..

Let’s look at these in more detail.

C for scientific programming

You should think of C as one of many tools in your toolkit for performing computational tasks in your scientific work. Take advantage of C when the situation calls for it. Use other languages when ease of use and maintainability are the goal or when the ecosystem developed around those ...