Features of C Language | Features of C Programming

C is a general purpose, procedural programming language supporting major programming language features. It is a feature-rich programming language. It offers various features and functionalities to the programmers. C has many features that make it a good choice for a programming language.

Following are the key features or characteristics of C language:

• Portability
• Flexibility
• Versatility
• Fast and Efficient
• Structured or Modular Programming Language
• Powerful
• Libraries with rich functions
• General Purpose Language
• Statically Type
• Extensible
• Middle-Level Language
• Dynamic Memory Allocation or Memory Management

Portability: 

Portability of a program means programs that are written on one operating system can run and compile on any other OS with slight changes or no change. If we have written a simple c program on Windows OS, and then compiled it and run it, we can then take the compiled code and run it on any other operating system or machine, like, Linux or macOS etc., our C program will always return the same result.

This makes C a machine independent programming language, and also saves developers the effort to rewrite the same code over and over again to implement in different systems. The ‘C’ programs can be easily ported because of the language design.    

Flexibility: 

Another feature of the C language is flexibility. One of the requirements in software development is the constant need for change and flexibility is easily achieved if the software design is modular. ‘C’ is a modular programming language where a program can be broken up into modules or functions.

Versatility: 

‘C’ is a versatile programming language as it is suitable to develop a very simple application or a very complex application.

Fast and Efficient:

C is a compiler-based program. This makes the compilation and execution of codes faster. Another factor that makes C fast is the availability of only the essential and required features. Newer programming languages offer numerous features, which increase functionality but reduce efficiency and speed.

‘C’ has the primary strength of being efficient. This is due to the fact that it has many low level functions. Moreover, ‘C’ has many kernel interacting system calls. C’s ability to build complex programs out of simple elements makes the development of software, more efficient.

Structured or Modular Programming Language:

In C, we can break the program into small blocks of code with the help of a function. Instead of writing a long and complex code, we can divide the program into small blocks of code as functions. Function is used for code reusability.

Modularity, in the context of programming code, refers to the process of dividing an entire program into smaller individual units. This is achieved with functions, libraries, and modules in C.

Powerful: 

C language is a very powerful programming language. It has a broad range of features like support for many data types, operators, keywords, etc., allows structuring of code using functions, loops, decision-making statements, then there are complex data-structures like structures, arrays, etc., and pointers, which makes C quite resourceful and powerful, etc. Using the C language we can easily read, write and create files.

Libraries with rich functions: 

The C programming language has a rich library which supports various inbuilt functions and libraries that create development fast. Apart from these functions, we can also add or define user-defined functions to the library. These functions help in solving numerous types of problems easily and also help in better and clean coding. These libraries are called header files in C language.

General Purpose Language:  

The C programming language is used in various applications like system programming to photo editing software. Also it is used to develop databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL Server etc. It is also used to develop Operating system such as Windows, Linux, Android, iOS etc.

Statically Type: 

It is also known as statically typed language. It means that the variables of a C program will be checked during compilation but not at the run time. In statically-typed languages, the programmer needs to define the data type of the variables declared.

Extensible:  

Another reason that makes C a popular programming language is the high degree of extensibility that it offers. The capability of already-written C programs can be extended easily by adding more code to the same. We can add more features and functionalities to the already written C program code. With that, we can perform more operations.

Middle-Level Language: 

C programming language supports two level programming instructions with the combination of low level and high level language that's why it is called middle level programming language. It offers low-level access to the computer hardware, i.e., it facilitates direct manipulation of the hardware, and also has the features of a high-level language.

The C programming language brings together the best of both worlds. A low-level language is generally fast, powerful but hard to understand and write code in. Whereas a high-level Language is easy for us to understand and write code in, it is also highly portable, but it is generally slow and is unable to directly interact to the system hardware.

Dynamic Memory Allocation or Memory Management: 

The C programming language supports dynamic memory allocation. It simply means that it is possible to alter the size of a data structure in C during the run time. Also, C comes with many prebuilt functions to deal with memory allocation. Calling the free() function, for instance, in C allows users to free allocated memory at any time required. Also, calloc(), malloc() and realloc() are powerful memory management functions in C.