When I started seriously implementing projects in C over 20 years ago, I was fascinated by the fact that you can do things in memory without using assembly. C is a very straightforward language with one feature that really impresses me: C is incredibly fast.

The argument that C is problematic with pointers doesn’t hold water for me. When programming, it’s my job to program in a resource-efficient way. But I’m a bit old-fashioned in that regard.

Languages ​​like Rust or Go solve many of the problems of C and C++, but they don’t feel as comfortable to me as C. If I had to choose something newer, I would use Rust. But it has hardly any technical background; it’s just a gut feeling I’ve developed over the past 15 years of programming.

Oh, I don’t use C++. This has nothing to do with a technical decision, but I don’t like C++. C++ isn’t nice. Python, for example, is a very nice language. I feel comfortable when programming languages ​​are very natural. Java is also nice, but I don’t use it anymore because I don’t have a use case for it. And to be honest, Ruby is weird… ;)

Ok, I am mixing languages and use cases. That’s not fair! But syntax is really important when writing code… PHP5 had a beautiful and simple style that I loved when it was first released.

When I was working on my own programming language (fun) some time ago, wanting to learn more about implementing it in an existing programming language, I chose C, even though I was aware of the advantages of other languages, such as Rust. But C just feels right.

Permalink: https://hanez.org/2025/10/14/why-i-love-c/

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