Outline of the C programming language

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The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to C:

C is a general-purpose programming language, procedural programming language, compiled language, and statically typed programming language. It was created by Dennis Ritchie in 1972 at Bell Labs as a successor to the B programming language.^[1]

C can be described as all of the following:

• Programming language — artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer.
• Compiled language — language implemented through compilers rather than interpreters
• Procedural programming language — programming paradigm based on the concept of procedure calls
• General-purpose programming language — designed for writing software in a wide variety of application domains
• Statically typed programming language — type checking is performed at compile-time^[2]

• Variables in C
• Data types in C
• Operators in C
• Control flow
• Pointers in C
• Memory management in C
• Header files
• Preprocessor directives

• Undefined behavior
• Constructs that behave differently in C and C++

• GCC — GNU Compiler Collection
• Clang — LLVM C compiler
• MSVC — Microsoft Visual C++ compiler (supports C)
• TinyCC
• Turbo C

The C standard library provides fundamental routines for:

• Input/output (stdio.h)
• String handling (string.h)
• Mathematical computations (math.h)
• Memory management (stdlib.h)
• Time and date (time.h)

• GLib
• SDL
• GSL
• libcurl
• OpenSSL

• B programming language — precursor to C
• K&R C — early version described by Kernighan and Ritchie
• ANSI C / ISO C standards:^[3]
  • C89/C90
  • C99
  • C11
  • C17
  • C23 — current standard

• CPython — the reference implementation of the Python programming language
• Git — version control system
• Linux kernel
• Lua
• PostgreSQL — relational database system
• Redis — in-memory database
• SQLite — embedded database engine
• Unix — originally rewritten in C at Bell Labs
• Vim

• Articles with example C code

• Andrew Koenig – C Traps and Pitfalls
• Brian W. Kernighan – The C Programming Language
• Guy L. Steele Jr. – C: A Reference Manual
• Herbert Schildt – C, The Complete Reference
• Peter van der Linden – Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets

• C/C++ Users Journal — (historical publication)

• Brian Kernighan
• Dennis Ritchie
• Ken Thompson
• Linus Torvalds

• Cyclone — safe variant
• Embedded C
• GNU C — features specific to GCC
• K&R C
• Microsoft C — Microsoft-specific extensions
• Objective-C — object-oriented extension of C

• Compatibility of C and C++
• List of software programming journals
• List of C-family programming languages
• Outline of computer programming
• Outline of software
• Outline of software engineering
• Outline of C++

• ISO C standard information
• C reference on cppreference.com