c

Basic idea

A small, low-level imperative language (Ritchie, 1972) that maps directly onto the abstract machine of a typical CPU. Manual memory, weak static typing, no runtime — still the lingua franca of systems programming.

Key facts

• Year / creator: 1972, Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs.
• Paradigm: imperative, procedural.
• Typing: static, weak (implicit conversions, casts).
• Memory: manual (malloc / free); undefined behaviour on misuse.
• Standardised: ANSI C (C89), C99, C11, C17, C23.

Siblings

• c 1
• cpp
• Erlang
• Go
• Haskell
• Java
• JavaScript
• Lua
• Racket
• risc v
• Rust
• TypeScript
• x86 Assembly