The development of the c language after the year 1992

 

Until the year 1992 the programming world was easy to grasp. The only programming language available was C which was working on all hardware e.g. 8bit homecomputer, 16bit intermediate computers and 32bit workstations and C was working on all operating systems like Amiga, MS-DOS, Unix. C was superior in terms of performance and lots of books were available to teach the language. There was no sort of comparison available between different languages, because all the programmers were using C and nothing but C.

After the year 1992 something has happened. At least in the public reception, the C language has felt out of fashion. There was the newly created Win31 operating system which was working with window libraries. There was a new language which was C++ and many new languages like Java and perl were initiated. C has become only one of many programming languages, especially for non expert programmers.

But let us slow down the situation a bit. In the time before the year 1992, the C language was indeed the best programming language. With so called cross compilers it was possible to run the same code on many systems. Other programming languages like BASiC were not compatible with C. There was no BASIC standard available and the performance was poor. What was different after the year 1992 was the upraising of GUI software namely the MFC library from microsoft. It seems, that the c language wasn't able to handle this added complexity. Instead the C++ language was prefered because C++ has a larger amount of built in functions and it is working much better with the GUI libraries.

For Unix and Linux operating system the importance of GUI software was lower. Most linux programs are console only applications which can be written in Ansi C very well. But if the objective is to create a GUI application in Linux, C can become a bottleneck. The well known Qt framework was written not in C but in C++. It seems, that object oriented programming and GUI software matches closely together.

But this connection isn't fixed. In ansi C it is pretty easy to register a signal event. A least in the gtk+ framework this can be used similar to C++. Also creating a window and menus is possible with Ansi C. So the question is, if C is capable to create Windows GUI, why was C replaced by alternative languages?

First thing to mention is, that the C language has felt out of fashion. Since the year 1992 all the major compilers are combining C with C++. Former C only compilers are no longer available. Also all the programming tutorials are oriented in the same way. It is explained in detail how to create GUI windows with C++ but doing the same with C is not explained.