Why would anybody use C over C

Question

Although people seem to like to complain about C    I haven t been able to find much evidence as to why you would want to choose C over C    C doesn t seem to get nearly as much flak and if C   has all these problems why can t you just restrict yourself to the C subset  What are your thoughts experience

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I would say that C gives you better control over optimization and efficiency than C   and hence would be useful in situations where memory and other resources are limited and every optimization helps   It also has a smaller footprint of course

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I choose to write in C because I enjoy working with a small  tight language  I like having access to a standard which can be read in a reasonable amount of time  for me -- I m a very slow reader   Moreover  I use it to write software for embedded systems for which few desirable C   compilers exist  like some PIC micro-controllers

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I haven t been able to find much evidence as to why you would want to choose C over C       You can hardly call what I m about to say evidence  it s just my opinion   People like C because it fits nicely inside the mind of the prgrammer   There are many complex rules of C    when do you need virtual destructors  when can you call virtual methods in a constructor  how does overloading and overriding interact        and to master them all takes a lot of effort   Also  between references  operator overloading and function overloading  understanding a piece of code can require you to understand other code that may or may not be easy to find   A different question in why organizations would prefer C over C     I don t know that  I m just a people  -   In the defense of C    it does bring valuable features to the table  the one I value most is probably parametric  ish  polymorphism  though  operations and types that takes one or more types as arguments

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Because they want to use features in C99 that don t have equivalents in C       However  there aren t as many C99 features that are useful to C   as people think at first glance   Variable-length arrays   C   has std  vectors   Support for complex imaginary numbers   C   has a templated complex type   Type-generic math functions   C   overloaded the standard math functions  causing the same result   Named initializers   Not in C    but there s a workaround   struct My class params       int i      long j      std  string name       My class params amp  set i int ii                i   ii          return  this             My class params amp  set j long jj                j   jj          return  this              template  lt typename STRING gt      My class params amp  set name STRING amp  amp  n                name   std  forward lt STRING gt  n           return  this             My class params                    set defaults           class My class       My class params params    public      My class const My class params amp  p    params p                   This allows you to write things like   My class mc My class params   set i 5  set name  Me

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This is pretty shallow but as a busy student I chose C because I thought C   would take too long to learn  Many professors at my university won t accept assignments in Python and I needed to pick up something quickly

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Long compile times can be annoying  With C   you can have very long compile times  which means  of course  more time for Stack Overflow

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Most of the significant features of c   somehow involve classes or templates   These are wonderful features except for the way the compiler transforms these into object code   Most compilers use name mangling  and the ones that don t do something at least as messy     If your system lives on its own  as is the case with many applications  then C   is a fine choice   If your system needs to interact with software not neccesarily written in C    most frequently in assembler  or Fortran Libraries  then you are in a tight spot   To interact with those kinds of cases  you ll need to disable name mangling for those symbols   this is usually done by declaring those objects extern  C   but then they can t be templates  overloaded functions  or classes   If those are likely to be your applications API  then you ll have to wrap them with helper functions  and keep those functions in sync with the actual implementations   And in reality  the C   language provides a standard syntax for features that can be easily implemented in pure C     In short  the overhead of interoperable C   is too high for most folks to justify

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Long compile times can be annoying  With C   you can have very long compile times  which means  of course  more time for Stack Overflow

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In addition to several other points mentioned already    Less surprise  that is  it is much easier to see what a piece of code will do do exactly   In C   you need to approach guru level to be able to know exactly what code the compiler generates  try a combination of templates  multiple inheritance  auto generated constructors  virtual functions and mix in a bit of namespace magic and argument dependent lookup    In many cases this magic is nice  but for example in real-time systems it can really screw up your day

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In addition to several other points mentioned already    Less surprise  that is  it is much easier to see what a piece of code will do do exactly   In C   you need to approach guru level to be able to know exactly what code the compiler generates  try a combination of templates  multiple inheritance  auto generated constructors  virtual functions and mix in a bit of namespace magic and argument dependent lookup    In many cases this magic is nice  but for example in real-time systems it can really screw up your day

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Linus  answer to your question is  Because C   is a horrible language   His evidence is anecdotal at best  but he has a point    Being more of a low level language  you would prefer it to C    C   is C with added libraries and compiler support for extra features  both languages have features the other language doesn t  and implement things differently   but if you have the time and experience with C  you can benefit from extra added low level related powers    Edited  because you get used to doing more work manually rather than benefit from some powers coming from the language compiler itself   Adding links   Why C   for embedded  Why are you still using C  PDF  I would google for this   because there are plenty of commentaries on the web already

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Until some years ago the existing C   compilers were missing important features  or the support was poor and the supported features vary wildly among them  and so it was hard to write portable applications  Because of the no standard naming of symbols it is difficult for other languages applications to support C   classes directly

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Linus  answer to your question is  Because C   is a horrible language   His evidence is anecdotal at best  but he has a point    Being more of a low level language  you would prefer it to C    C   is C with added libraries and compiler support for extra features  both languages have features the other language doesn t  and implement things differently   but if you have the time and experience with C  you can benefit from extra added low level related powers    Edited  because you get used to doing more work manually rather than benefit from some powers coming from the language compiler itself   Adding links   Why C   for embedded  Why are you still using C  PDF  I would google for this   because there are plenty of commentaries on the web already

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Joel s answer is good for reasons you might have to use C  though there are a few others   You must meet industry guidelines  which are easier to prove and test for in C You have tools to work with C  but not C    think not just about the compiler  but all the support tools  coverage  analysis  etc  Your target developers are C gurus You re writing drivers  kernels  or other low-level code You know the C   compiler isn t good at optimizing the kind of code you need to write Your app not only doesn t lend itself to be object-oriented but would be harder to write in that form  In some cases  though  you might want to use C rather than C     You want the performance of assembler without the trouble of coding in assembler  C   is  in theory  capable of  perfect  performance  but the compilers aren t as good at seeing optimizations a good C programmer will see   The software you re writing is trivial  or nearly so - whip out the tiny C compiler  write a few lines of code  compile and you re all set - no need to open a huge editor with helpers  no need to write practically empty and useless classes  deal with namespaces  etc   You can do nearly the same thing with a C   compiler and simply use the C subset  but the C   compiler is slower  even for tiny programs   You need extreme performance or small code size and know the C   compiler will actually make it harder to accomplish due to the size and performance of the libraries    You contend that you could just use the C subset and compile with a C   compiler  but you ll find that if you do that you ll get slightly different results depending on the compiler  Regardless  if you re doing that  you re using C   Is your question really  quot Why don t C programmers use C   compilers  quot  If it is  then you either don t understand the language differences  or you don t understand the compiler theory

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Because you re writing for a system where resources are tight  such as an embedded system  or some kind real bare metal code like a kernel  and you want as little overhead as possible   There s a reason why most embedded systems don t have a C   compiler - it s not that people don t want one  it s that cramming C   code into that small a space is task that approaches impossible

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Because they already know C Because they re building an embedded app for a platform that only has a C compiler Because they re maintaining legacy software written in C You re writing something on the level of an operating system  a relational database engine  or a retail 3D video game engine

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What C needed was a better preprocessor  cfront was one and thus born c    I ld use C  where the  c   as preprocessor  would not be okay   I m pretty sure  at the bottom of any well written c   library framework toolkit  you would find dirty-old-c   or static casts  which is same

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Because for many programming tasks C is simpler  and good enough  When I m programming lightweight utilities especially  I can feel like C   wants me to build in an elegant supersructure for its own sake  rather than simply write the code   OTOH  for more complex projects  the elegance provides more good solid structural rigor than would naturally flow out of my keyboard

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Fears of performance or bloat are not good reason to forgo C    Every language has its potential pitfalls and trade offs - good programmers learn about these and where necessary develop coping strategies  poor programmers will fall foul and blame the language   Interpreted Python is in many ways considered to be a  slow  language  but for non-trivial tasks a skilled Python programmer can easily produce code that executes faster than that of an inexperienced C developer   In my industry  video games  we write high performance code in C   by avoiding things such as RTTI  exceptions  or virtual-functions in inner loops  These can be extremely useful but have performance or bloat problems that it s desirable to avoid  If we were to go a step further and switch entirely to C we would gain little and lose the most useful constructs of C      The biggest practical reason for preferring C is that support is more widespread than C    There are many platforms  particularly embedded ones  that do not even have C   compilers   There is also the matter of compatibility for vendors  While C has a stable and well-defined ABI  Application Binary Interface  C   does not  The ABI in C   is more complicated due to such things as vtables and constructurs destructors so is implemented differently with every vendor  and even versions of a vendors toolchain   In real-terms this means you cannot take a library generated by one compiler and link it with code or a library from another which creates a nightmare for distributed projects or middleware providers of binary libraries

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There s also the approach some shops take of using some of C   s features in a C-like way  but avoiding ones that are objectionable  For example  using classes and class methods and function overloading  which are usually easy for even C diehards to cope with   but not the STL  stream operators  and Boost  which are harder to learn and can have bad memory characteristics

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I choose to write in C because I enjoy working with a small  tight language  I like having access to a standard which can be read in a reasonable amount of time  for me -- I m a very slow reader   Moreover  I use it to write software for embedded systems for which few desirable C   compilers exist  like some PIC micro-controllers

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I like minimalism  amp  simplicity

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Joel s answer is good for reasons you might have to use C  though there are a few others   You must meet industry guidelines  which are easier to prove and test for in C You have tools to work with C  but not C    think not just about the compiler  but all the support tools  coverage  analysis  etc  Your target developers are C gurus You re writing drivers  kernels  or other low-level code You know the C   compiler isn t good at optimizing the kind of code you need to write Your app not only doesn t lend itself to be object-oriented but would be harder to write in that form  In some cases  though  you might want to use C rather than C     You want the performance of assembler without the trouble of coding in assembler  C   is  in theory  capable of  perfect  performance  but the compilers aren t as good at seeing optimizations a good C programmer will see   The software you re writing is trivial  or nearly so - whip out the tiny C compiler  write a few lines of code  compile and you re all set - no need to open a huge editor with helpers  no need to write practically empty and useless classes  deal with namespaces  etc   You can do nearly the same thing with a C   compiler and simply use the C subset  but the C   compiler is slower  even for tiny programs   You need extreme performance or small code size and know the C   compiler will actually make it harder to accomplish due to the size and performance of the libraries    You contend that you could just use the C subset and compile with a C   compiler  but you ll find that if you do that you ll get slightly different results depending on the compiler  Regardless  if you re doing that  you re using C   Is your question really  quot Why don t C programmers use C   compilers  quot  If it is  then you either don t understand the language differences  or you don t understand the compiler theory

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I haven t been able to find much evidence as to why you would want to choose C over C       You can hardly call what I m about to say evidence  it s just my opinion   People like C because it fits nicely inside the mind of the prgrammer   There are many complex rules of C    when do you need virtual destructors  when can you call virtual methods in a constructor  how does overloading and overriding interact        and to master them all takes a lot of effort   Also  between references  operator overloading and function overloading  understanding a piece of code can require you to understand other code that may or may not be easy to find   A different question in why organizations would prefer C over C     I don t know that  I m just a people  -   In the defense of C    it does bring valuable features to the table  the one I value most is probably parametric  ish  polymorphism  though  operations and types that takes one or more types as arguments

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Because they already know C Because they re building an embedded app for a platform that only has a C compiler Because they re maintaining legacy software written in C You re writing something on the level of an operating system  a relational database engine  or a retail 3D video game engine

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I m surprised no one s mentioned libraries   Lots of languages can link against C libs and call C functions  including C   with extern  C     C   is pretty much the only thing that can use a C   lib  defined as  a lib that uses features in C   that are not in C  such as overloaded functions  virtual methods  overloaded operators        and does not export everything through C compatible interfaces via extern  C

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Fears of performance or bloat are not good reason to forgo C    Every language has its potential pitfalls and trade offs - good programmers learn about these and where necessary develop coping strategies  poor programmers will fall foul and blame the language   Interpreted Python is in many ways considered to be a  slow  language  but for non-trivial tasks a skilled Python programmer can easily produce code that executes faster than that of an inexperienced C developer   In my industry  video games  we write high performance code in C   by avoiding things such as RTTI  exceptions  or virtual-functions in inner loops  These can be extremely useful but have performance or bloat problems that it s desirable to avoid  If we were to go a step further and switch entirely to C we would gain little and lose the most useful constructs of C      The biggest practical reason for preferring C is that support is more widespread than C    There are many platforms  particularly embedded ones  that do not even have C   compilers   There is also the matter of compatibility for vendors  While C has a stable and well-defined ABI  Application Binary Interface  C   does not  The ABI in C   is more complicated due to such things as vtables and constructurs destructors so is implemented differently with every vendor  and even versions of a vendors toolchain   In real-terms this means you cannot take a library generated by one compiler and link it with code or a library from another which creates a nightmare for distributed projects or middleware providers of binary libraries

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What C needed was a better preprocessor  cfront was one and thus born c    I ld use C  where the  c   as preprocessor  would not be okay   I m pretty sure  at the bottom of any well written c   library framework toolkit  you would find dirty-old-c   or static casts  which is same

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One remark about  just use the subset of C   you want to use   the problem with this idea is that it has a cost to enforce that everybody in the project uses the same subset  My own opinion is that those costs are quite high for loosely coupled projects  e g  open source ones   and also that C   totally failed at being a better C  in the sense that you cannot use C   wherever you used C

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I would say that C gives you better control over optimization and efficiency than C   and hence would be useful in situations where memory and other resources are limited and every optimization helps   It also has a smaller footprint of course

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Because for many programming tasks C is simpler  and good enough  When I m programming lightweight utilities especially  I can feel like C   wants me to build in an elegant supersructure for its own sake  rather than simply write the code   OTOH  for more complex projects  the elegance provides more good solid structural rigor than would naturally flow out of my keyboard

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What C needed was a better preprocessor  cfront was one and thus born c    I ld use C  where the  c   as preprocessor  would not be okay   I m pretty sure  at the bottom of any well written c   library framework toolkit  you would find dirty-old-c   or static casts  which is same

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Because they already know C Because they re building an embedded app for a platform that only has a C compiler Because they re maintaining legacy software written in C You re writing something on the level of an operating system  a relational database engine  or a retail 3D video game engine

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Linus  answer to your question is  Because C   is a horrible language   His evidence is anecdotal at best  but he has a point    Being more of a low level language  you would prefer it to C    C   is C with added libraries and compiler support for extra features  both languages have features the other language doesn t  and implement things differently   but if you have the time and experience with C  you can benefit from extra added low level related powers    Edited  because you get used to doing more work manually rather than benefit from some powers coming from the language compiler itself   Adding links   Why C   for embedded  Why are you still using C  PDF  I would google for this   because there are plenty of commentaries on the web already

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I would say that C gives you better control over optimization and efficiency than C   and hence would be useful in situations where memory and other resources are limited and every optimization helps   It also has a smaller footprint of course

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I m surprised no one s mentioned libraries   Lots of languages can link against C libs and call C functions  including C   with extern  C     C   is pretty much the only thing that can use a C   lib  defined as  a lib that uses features in C   that are not in C  such as overloaded functions  virtual methods  overloaded operators        and does not export everything through C compatible interfaces via extern  C

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Until some years ago the existing C   compilers were missing important features  or the support was poor and the supported features vary wildly among them  and so it was hard to write portable applications  Because of the no standard naming of symbols it is difficult for other languages applications to support C   classes directly

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If you want your code to be understood by virtually any programmer write in C

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Because you re writing for a system where resources are tight  such as an embedded system  or some kind real bare metal code like a kernel  and you want as little overhead as possible   There s a reason why most embedded systems don t have a C   compiler - it s not that people don t want one  it s that cramming C   code into that small a space is task that approaches impossible

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Joel s answer is good for reasons you might have to use C  though there are a few others   You must meet industry guidelines  which are easier to prove and test for in C You have tools to work with C  but not C    think not just about the compiler  but all the support tools  coverage  analysis  etc  Your target developers are C gurus You re writing drivers  kernels  or other low-level code You know the C   compiler isn t good at optimizing the kind of code you need to write Your app not only doesn t lend itself to be object-oriented but would be harder to write in that form  In some cases  though  you might want to use C rather than C     You want the performance of assembler without the trouble of coding in assembler  C   is  in theory  capable of  perfect  performance  but the compilers aren t as good at seeing optimizations a good C programmer will see   The software you re writing is trivial  or nearly so - whip out the tiny C compiler  write a few lines of code  compile and you re all set - no need to open a huge editor with helpers  no need to write practically empty and useless classes  deal with namespaces  etc   You can do nearly the same thing with a C   compiler and simply use the C subset  but the C   compiler is slower  even for tiny programs   You need extreme performance or small code size and know the C   compiler will actually make it harder to accomplish due to the size and performance of the libraries    You contend that you could just use the C subset and compile with a C   compiler  but you ll find that if you do that you ll get slightly different results depending on the compiler  Regardless  if you re doing that  you re using C   Is your question really  quot Why don t C programmers use C   compilers  quot  If it is  then you either don t understand the language differences  or you don t understand the compiler theory

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Because you re writing for a system where resources are tight  such as an embedded system  or some kind real bare metal code like a kernel  and you want as little overhead as possible   There s a reason why most embedded systems don t have a C   compiler - it s not that people don t want one  it s that cramming C   code into that small a space is task that approaches impossible

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Because for many programming tasks C is simpler  and good enough  When I m programming lightweight utilities especially  I can feel like C   wants me to build in an elegant supersructure for its own sake  rather than simply write the code   OTOH  for more complex projects  the elegance provides more good solid structural rigor than would naturally flow out of my keyboard

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One remark about  just use the subset of C   you want to use   the problem with this idea is that it has a cost to enforce that everybody in the project uses the same subset  My own opinion is that those costs are quite high for loosely coupled projects  e g  open source ones   and also that C   totally failed at being a better C  in the sense that you cannot use C   wherever you used C

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I choose to write in C because I enjoy working with a small  tight language  I like having access to a standard which can be read in a reasonable amount of time  for me -- I m a very slow reader   Moreover  I use it to write software for embedded systems for which few desirable C   compilers exist  like some PIC micro-controllers

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I m used to use C   for my projects  Then I got a job where plain C is used  a 20 year old evolving codebase of an AV software with poor documentation       The 3 things I like in C are    Nothing is implicit  you see what your program exactly does or not does  This makes debugging easier   The lack of namespaces and overloads can be an advantage  if you want to know where a certain function is called  just grep through the source code directory and it will tell you  No other special tools needed  I rediscovered the power of the function pointers  Basically they allow you to do all polymorphic stuff you do in C    but they are even more flexible

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There s also the approach some shops take of using some of C   s features in a C-like way  but avoiding ones that are objectionable  For example  using classes and class methods and function overloading  which are usually easy for even C diehards to cope with   but not the STL  stream operators  and Boost  which are harder to learn and can have bad memory characteristics

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I choose to write in C because I enjoy working with a small  tight language  I like having access to a standard which can be read in a reasonable amount of time  for me -- I m a very slow reader   Moreover  I use it to write software for embedded systems for which few desirable C   compilers exist  like some PIC micro-controllers

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Because they re writing a plugin and C   has no standard ABI

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Fears of performance or bloat are not good reason to forgo C    Every language has its potential pitfalls and trade offs - good programmers learn about these and where necessary develop coping strategies  poor programmers will fall foul and blame the language   Interpreted Python is in many ways considered to be a  slow  language  but for non-trivial tasks a skilled Python programmer can easily produce code that executes faster than that of an inexperienced C developer   In my industry  video games  we write high performance code in C   by avoiding things such as RTTI  exceptions  or virtual-functions in inner loops  These can be extremely useful but have performance or bloat problems that it s desirable to avoid  If we were to go a step further and switch entirely to C we would gain little and lose the most useful constructs of C      The biggest practical reason for preferring C is that support is more widespread than C    There are many platforms  particularly embedded ones  that do not even have C   compilers   There is also the matter of compatibility for vendors  While C has a stable and well-defined ABI  Application Binary Interface  C   does not  The ABI in C   is more complicated due to such things as vtables and constructurs destructors so is implemented differently with every vendor  and even versions of a vendors toolchain   In real-terms this means you cannot take a library generated by one compiler and link it with code or a library from another which creates a nightmare for distributed projects or middleware providers of binary libraries

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I like minimalism  amp  simplicity

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If you want your code to be understood by virtually any programmer write in C

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I take the other view  why use C   instead of C   The book The C Programming Language  aka  K amp R  tells you clearly how to do everything the language can do in under 300 pages  It s a masterpiece of minimalism  No C   book even comes close   The obvious counterargument is that the same could be said of most  if not all  modern languages -- they also can t tell you how to do everything in only a few hundred pages  True  So why use C   instead  Feature richness  Power  If you need something more feature rich or powerful then go with C   Objective C  Java  or something else like that  Why burden yourself with the complexities of C    If you need the degree of control C   grants then I argue to use C  C can do anything and can do it well

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Fears of performance or bloat are not good reason to forgo C    Every language has its potential pitfalls and trade offs - good programmers learn about these and where necessary develop coping strategies  poor programmers will fall foul and blame the language   Interpreted Python is in many ways considered to be a  slow  language  but for non-trivial tasks a skilled Python programmer can easily produce code that executes faster than that of an inexperienced C developer   In my industry  video games  we write high performance code in C   by avoiding things such as RTTI  exceptions  or virtual-functions in inner loops  These can be extremely useful but have performance or bloat problems that it s desirable to avoid  If we were to go a step further and switch entirely to C we would gain little and lose the most useful constructs of C      The biggest practical reason for preferring C is that support is more widespread than C    There are many platforms  particularly embedded ones  that do not even have C   compilers   There is also the matter of compatibility for vendors  While C has a stable and well-defined ABI  Application Binary Interface  C   does not  The ABI in C   is more complicated due to such things as vtables and constructurs destructors so is implemented differently with every vendor  and even versions of a vendors toolchain   In real-terms this means you cannot take a library generated by one compiler and link it with code or a library from another which creates a nightmare for distributed projects or middleware providers of binary libraries

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I take the other view  why use C   instead of C   The book The C Programming Language  aka  K amp R  tells you clearly how to do everything the language can do in under 300 pages  It s a masterpiece of minimalism  No C   book even comes close   The obvious counterargument is that the same could be said of most  if not all  modern languages -- they also can t tell you how to do everything in only a few hundred pages  True  So why use C   instead  Feature richness  Power  If you need something more feature rich or powerful then go with C   Objective C  Java  or something else like that  Why burden yourself with the complexities of C    If you need the degree of control C   grants then I argue to use C  C can do anything and can do it well

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Because they re writing a plugin and C   has no standard ABI

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Until some years ago the existing C   compilers were missing important features  or the support was poor and the supported features vary wildly among them  and so it was hard to write portable applications  Because of the no standard naming of symbols it is difficult for other languages applications to support C   classes directly

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Until some years ago the existing C   compilers were missing important features  or the support was poor and the supported features vary wildly among them  and so it was hard to write portable applications  Because of the no standard naming of symbols it is difficult for other languages applications to support C   classes directly

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Because they want to use features in C99 that don t have equivalents in C       However  there aren t as many C99 features that are useful to C   as people think at first glance   Variable-length arrays   C   has std  vectors   Support for complex imaginary numbers   C   has a templated complex type   Type-generic math functions   C   overloaded the standard math functions  causing the same result   Named initializers   Not in C    but there s a workaround   struct My class params       int i      long j      std  string name       My class params amp  set i int ii                i   ii          return  this             My class params amp  set j long jj                j   jj          return  this              template  lt typename STRING gt      My class params amp  set name STRING amp  amp  n                name   std  forward lt STRING gt  n           return  this             My class params                    set defaults           class My class       My class params params    public      My class const My class params amp  p    params p                   This allows you to write things like   My class mc My class params   set i 5  set name  Me

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I haven t been able to find much evidence as to why you would want to choose C over C       You can hardly call what I m about to say evidence  it s just my opinion   People like C because it fits nicely inside the mind of the prgrammer   There are many complex rules of C    when do you need virtual destructors  when can you call virtual methods in a constructor  how does overloading and overriding interact        and to master them all takes a lot of effort   Also  between references  operator overloading and function overloading  understanding a piece of code can require you to understand other code that may or may not be easy to find   A different question in why organizations would prefer C over C     I don t know that  I m just a people  -   In the defense of C    it does bring valuable features to the table  the one I value most is probably parametric  ish  polymorphism  though  operations and types that takes one or more types as arguments

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Because for many programming tasks C is simpler  and good enough  When I m programming lightweight utilities especially  I can feel like C   wants me to build in an elegant supersructure for its own sake  rather than simply write the code   OTOH  for more complex projects  the elegance provides more good solid structural rigor than would naturally flow out of my keyboard

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Long compile times can be annoying  With C   you can have very long compile times  which means  of course  more time for Stack Overflow

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I would say that C gives you better control over optimization and efficiency than C   and hence would be useful in situations where memory and other resources are limited and every optimization helps   It also has a smaller footprint of course

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Oh my  C vs C    a great way to start a flame war      I think C is better for driver and embedded code   C   has some great features that C doesn t have  but many of the object oriented features of C   can cause monumental coding messes when people write code with non-obvious side-effects that occur behinds the scenes   Crazy code can be hidden in constructors  destructors  virtual functions       The beauty of C code is the language does nothing non-obvious behind your back  thus you can read the code and not have to look up at every constructor and destructor and so on   A lot of the problem is bad coding practices by SOME people   My perfect language would be a combination of C99 plus a minimal subset of safer C   capabilities that adds ZERO  or near zero  compiler overhead to the binary output   Perfect additions would be class encapsulation and naming concepts of data and functions

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I haven t been able to find much evidence as to why you would want to choose C over C       You can hardly call what I m about to say evidence  it s just my opinion   People like C because it fits nicely inside the mind of the prgrammer   There are many complex rules of C    when do you need virtual destructors  when can you call virtual methods in a constructor  how does overloading and overriding interact        and to master them all takes a lot of effort   Also  between references  operator overloading and function overloading  understanding a piece of code can require you to understand other code that may or may not be easy to find   A different question in why organizations would prefer C over C     I don t know that  I m just a people  -   In the defense of C    it does bring valuable features to the table  the one I value most is probably parametric  ish  polymorphism  though  operations and types that takes one or more types as arguments

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This is pretty shallow but as a busy student I chose C because I thought C   would take too long to learn  Many professors at my university won t accept assignments in Python and I needed to pick up something quickly

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I take the other view  why use C   instead of C   The book The C Programming Language  aka  K amp R  tells you clearly how to do everything the language can do in under 300 pages  It s a masterpiece of minimalism  No C   book even comes close   The obvious counterargument is that the same could be said of most  if not all  modern languages -- they also can t tell you how to do everything in only a few hundred pages  True  So why use C   instead  Feature richness  Power  If you need something more feature rich or powerful then go with C   Objective C  Java  or something else like that  Why burden yourself with the complexities of C    If you need the degree of control C   grants then I argue to use C  C can do anything and can do it well

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In addition to several other points mentioned already    Less surprise  that is  it is much easier to see what a piece of code will do do exactly   In C   you need to approach guru level to be able to know exactly what code the compiler generates  try a combination of templates  multiple inheritance  auto generated constructors  virtual functions and mix in a bit of namespace magic and argument dependent lookup    In many cases this magic is nice  but for example in real-time systems it can really screw up your day

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Most of the significant features of c   somehow involve classes or templates   These are wonderful features except for the way the compiler transforms these into object code   Most compilers use name mangling  and the ones that don t do something at least as messy     If your system lives on its own  as is the case with many applications  then C   is a fine choice   If your system needs to interact with software not neccesarily written in C    most frequently in assembler  or Fortran Libraries  then you are in a tight spot   To interact with those kinds of cases  you ll need to disable name mangling for those symbols   this is usually done by declaring those objects extern  C   but then they can t be templates  overloaded functions  or classes   If those are likely to be your applications API  then you ll have to wrap them with helper functions  and keep those functions in sync with the actual implementations   And in reality  the C   language provides a standard syntax for features that can be easily implemented in pure C     In short  the overhead of interoperable C   is too high for most folks to justify

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Long compile times can be annoying  With C   you can have very long compile times  which means  of course  more time for Stack Overflow

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What C needed was a better preprocessor  cfront was one and thus born c    I ld use C  where the  c   as preprocessor  would not be okay   I m pretty sure  at the bottom of any well written c   library framework toolkit  you would find dirty-old-c   or static casts  which is same

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I m used to use C   for my projects  Then I got a job where plain C is used  a 20 year old evolving codebase of an AV software with poor documentation       The 3 things I like in C are    Nothing is implicit  you see what your program exactly does or not does  This makes debugging easier   The lack of namespaces and overloads can be an advantage  if you want to know where a certain function is called  just grep through the source code directory and it will tell you  No other special tools needed  I rediscovered the power of the function pointers  Basically they allow you to do all polymorphic stuff you do in C    but they are even more flexible

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Because they re writing a plugin and C   has no standard ABI

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Because you re writing for a system where resources are tight  such as an embedded system  or some kind real bare metal code like a kernel  and you want as little overhead as possible   There s a reason why most embedded systems don t have a C   compiler - it s not that people don t want one  it s that cramming C   code into that small a space is task that approaches impossible

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One remark about  just use the subset of C   you want to use   the problem with this idea is that it has a cost to enforce that everybody in the project uses the same subset  My own opinion is that those costs are quite high for loosely coupled projects  e g  open source ones   and also that C   totally failed at being a better C  in the sense that you cannot use C   wherever you used C

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In addition to several other points mentioned already    Less surprise  that is  it is much easier to see what a piece of code will do do exactly   In C   you need to approach guru level to be able to know exactly what code the compiler generates  try a combination of templates  multiple inheritance  auto generated constructors  virtual functions and mix in a bit of namespace magic and argument dependent lookup    In many cases this magic is nice  but for example in real-time systems it can really screw up your day

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I m surprised no one s mentioned libraries   Lots of languages can link against C libs and call C functions  including C   with extern  C     C   is pretty much the only thing that can use a C   lib  defined as  a lib that uses features in C   that are not in C  such as overloaded functions  virtual methods  overloaded operators        and does not export everything through C compatible interfaces via extern  C

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Because they already know C Because they re building an embedded app for a platform that only has a C compiler Because they re maintaining legacy software written in C You re writing something on the level of an operating system  a relational database engine  or a retail 3D video game engine

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One remark about  just use the subset of C   you want to use   the problem with this idea is that it has a cost to enforce that everybody in the project uses the same subset  My own opinion is that those costs are quite high for loosely coupled projects  e g  open source ones   and also that C   totally failed at being a better C  in the sense that you cannot use C   wherever you used C

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Most of the significant features of c   somehow involve classes or templates   These are wonderful features except for the way the compiler transforms these into object code   Most compilers use name mangling  and the ones that don t do something at least as messy     If your system lives on its own  as is the case with many applications  then C   is a fine choice   If your system needs to interact with software not neccesarily written in C    most frequently in assembler  or Fortran Libraries  then you are in a tight spot   To interact with those kinds of cases  you ll need to disable name mangling for those symbols   this is usually done by declaring those objects extern  C   but then they can t be templates  overloaded functions  or classes   If those are likely to be your applications API  then you ll have to wrap them with helper functions  and keep those functions in sync with the actual implementations   And in reality  the C   language provides a standard syntax for features that can be easily implemented in pure C     In short  the overhead of interoperable C   is too high for most folks to justify

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Because they want to use features in C99 that don t have equivalents in C       However  there aren t as many C99 features that are useful to C   as people think at first glance   Variable-length arrays   C   has std  vectors   Support for complex imaginary numbers   C   has a templated complex type   Type-generic math functions   C   overloaded the standard math functions  causing the same result   Named initializers   Not in C    but there s a workaround   struct My class params       int i      long j      std  string name       My class params amp  set i int ii                i   ii          return  this             My class params amp  set j long jj                j   jj          return  this              template  lt typename STRING gt      My class params amp  set name STRING amp  amp  n                name   std  forward lt STRING gt  n           return  this             My class params                    set defaults           class My class       My class params params    public      My class const My class params amp  p    params p                   This allows you to write things like   My class mc My class params   set i 5  set name  Me

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There s also the approach some shops take of using some of C   s features in a C-like way  but avoiding ones that are objectionable  For example  using classes and class methods and function overloading  which are usually easy for even C diehards to cope with   but not the STL  stream operators  and Boost  which are harder to learn and can have bad memory characteristics

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I m surprised no one s mentioned libraries   Lots of languages can link against C libs and call C functions  including C   with extern  C     C   is pretty much the only thing that can use a C   lib  defined as  a lib that uses features in C   that are not in C  such as overloaded functions  virtual methods  overloaded operators        and does not export everything through C compatible interfaces via extern  C

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Because they want to use features in C99 that don t have equivalents in C       However  there aren t as many C99 features that are useful to C   as people think at first glance   Variable-length arrays   C   has std  vectors   Support for complex imaginary numbers   C   has a templated complex type   Type-generic math functions   C   overloaded the standard math functions  causing the same result   Named initializers   Not in C    but there s a workaround   struct My class params       int i      long j      std  string name       My class params amp  set i int ii                i   ii          return  this             My class params amp  set j long jj                j   jj          return  this              template  lt typename STRING gt      My class params amp  set name STRING amp  amp  n                name   std  forward lt STRING gt  n           return  this             My class params                    set defaults           class My class       My class params params    public      My class const My class params amp  p    params p                   This allows you to write things like   My class mc My class params   set i 5  set name  Me

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Because they re writing a plugin and C   has no standard ABI

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This is pretty shallow but as a busy student I chose C because I thought C   would take too long to learn  Many professors at my university won t accept assignments in Python and I needed to pick up something quickly

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This is pretty shallow but as a busy student I chose C because I thought C   would take too long to learn  Many professors at my university won t accept assignments in Python and I needed to pick up something quickly

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Joel s answer is good for reasons you might have to use C  though there are a few others   You must meet industry guidelines  which are easier to prove and test for in C You have tools to work with C  but not C    think not just about the compiler  but all the support tools  coverage  analysis  etc  Your target developers are C gurus You re writing drivers  kernels  or other low-level code You know the C   compiler isn t good at optimizing the kind of code you need to write Your app not only doesn t lend itself to be object-oriented but would be harder to write in that form  In some cases  though  you might want to use C rather than C     You want the performance of assembler without the trouble of coding in assembler  C   is  in theory  capable of  perfect  performance  but the compilers aren t as good at seeing optimizations a good C programmer will see   The software you re writing is trivial  or nearly so - whip out the tiny C compiler  write a few lines of code  compile and you re all set - no need to open a huge editor with helpers  no need to write practically empty and useless classes  deal with namespaces  etc   You can do nearly the same thing with a C   compiler and simply use the C subset  but the C   compiler is slower  even for tiny programs   You need extreme performance or small code size and know the C   compiler will actually make it harder to accomplish due to the size and performance of the libraries    You contend that you could just use the C subset and compile with a C   compiler  but you ll find that if you do that you ll get slightly different results depending on the compiler  Regardless  if you re doing that  you re using C   Is your question really  quot Why don t C programmers use C   compilers  quot  If it is  then you either don t understand the language differences  or you don t understand the compiler theory

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Most of the significant features of c   somehow involve classes or templates   These are wonderful features except for the way the compiler transforms these into object code   Most compilers use name mangling  and the ones that don t do something at least as messy     If your system lives on its own  as is the case with many applications  then C   is a fine choice   If your system needs to interact with software not neccesarily written in C    most frequently in assembler  or Fortran Libraries  then you are in a tight spot   To interact with those kinds of cases  you ll need to disable name mangling for those symbols   this is usually done by declaring those objects extern  C   but then they can t be templates  overloaded functions  or classes   If those are likely to be your applications API  then you ll have to wrap them with helper functions  and keep those functions in sync with the actual implementations   And in reality  the C   language provides a standard syntax for features that can be easily implemented in pure C     In short  the overhead of interoperable C   is too high for most folks to justify

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Linus  answer to your question is  Because C   is a horrible language   His evidence is anecdotal at best  but he has a point    Being more of a low level language  you would prefer it to C    C   is C with added libraries and compiler support for extra features  both languages have features the other language doesn t  and implement things differently   but if you have the time and experience with C  you can benefit from extra added low level related powers    Edited  because you get used to doing more work manually rather than benefit from some powers coming from the language compiler itself   Adding links   Why C   for embedded  Why are you still using C  PDF  I would google for this   because there are plenty of commentaries on the web already

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There s also the approach some shops take of using some of C   s features in a C-like way  but avoiding ones that are objectionable  For example  using classes and class methods and function overloading  which are usually easy for even C diehards to cope with   but not the STL  stream operators  and Boost  which are harder to learn and can have bad memory characteristics

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Oh my  C vs C    a great way to start a flame war      I think C is better for driver and embedded code   C   has some great features that C doesn t have  but many of the object oriented features of C   can cause monumental coding messes when people write code with non-obvious side-effects that occur behinds the scenes   Crazy code can be hidden in constructors  destructors  virtual functions       The beauty of C code is the language does nothing non-obvious behind your back  thus you can read the code and not have to look up at every constructor and destructor and so on   A lot of the problem is bad coding practices by SOME people   My perfect language would be a combination of C99 plus a minimal subset of safer C   capabilities that adds ZERO  or near zero  compiler overhead to the binary output   Perfect additions would be class encapsulation and naming concepts of data and functions

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I take the other view  why use C   instead of C   The book The C Programming Language  aka  K amp R  tells you clearly how to do everything the language can do in under 300 pages  It s a masterpiece of minimalism  No C   book even comes close   The obvious counterargument is that the same could be said of most  if not all  modern languages -- they also can t tell you how to do everything in only a few hundred pages  True  So why use C   instead  Feature richness  Power  If you need something more feature rich or powerful then go with C   Objective C  Java  or something else like that  Why burden yourself with the complexities of C    If you need the degree of control C   grants then I argue to use C  C can do anything and can do it well

[c++] Why would anybody use C over C++?

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