Expert: vijayan - 11/11/2010

Question
Hi Vijayan,

My question to you is that inspite of having C++ why does
the world still use C, i mean C++ has oops and much more
functionality, we have java, C#, .NET ... but... but, why is
C still being given such a high importance.

Thanks,

Neville.

Answer
Part of the reason is historical - a number of truly great programs, which are still in use have been written in C. An example would be the BSD Unix operating system; in particular its TCP/IP protocol stack and the Berkeley Fast Filesystem.

There are some application niches for which C is still king - programs that require maximum speed, have real-time requirements and need to run under tight memory constraints; programs that are tightly coupled to the Operating System kernel, which require C. In addition, some of the most widely used Application Programming Interfaces are C interfaces - the Posix API, the Win32 API and so on.

C++ is slowly making inroads into all these areas; but C has a great amount of momentum. C's best side is that it is turing complete; it has no first order weaknesses; it is a high-level assembler very close to the hardware. Its worst side is that programming in it is very often a resource-management nightmare.