Ask HN: Who is using C? I'm a senior web developer that sometimes struggle with the over complicated stuck full of dependences that hide how the real technology works. Sometimes I would like to do a step back and simplify the way I work, basically using just a few tools / language that have less ideas but that the power to do big things! C is a language that can be easily to understand but very very difficult to master. I'm very curious to knwo who is using it and for what! Thank you :) |
C is still highly used for low-level system software development: OS stuff like drivers, libraries, compilers, databases, software that runs in specialized small hardware, etc. C++ is for those slightly-higher abstractions that still require a lot of performance, like video-games and some of the former. Some stuff is getting very slowly replaced by Rust, but it will still take a long time for Rust to corrode the C/C++ market share in the lowest level stuff.
But I did spent an awful lot of time in C lately while writing this book:
Please try to be more helpful and less presumptive, especially when someone is asking to learn.
Those are kind of unavoidable if you want to package your code for multiple browsers, but with the languages above, you at least only have a single build step from your code to a deployable web package, and you can get much closer to the metal (e.g. write your own server) without having to manually manage memory.