When Should I Use C?

As we learned in the previous lesson, C has an edge over many of the other languages in that it’s fast, has a fine-grained access to the system, and has a small memory footprint. This makes C a language of choice for scientific applications, system programming, and Internet of Things (IoT) devicesAny physical device that’s connected to the internet and has the ability to collect, send, or receive data. For example, the smoke detector at your home that has the ability to send alerts to your mobile phone and the fitness monitor that you wear and that automatically syncs with your computer are all IoT devices..

Let’s look at these in more detail.

C for scientific programming

You should think of C as one of many tools in your toolkit for performing computational tasks in your scientific work: Taking advantage of C when the situation calls for it. Using other languages when ease of use and maintainability is the goal, or when the ecosystem ...