C Installation

You need to install C Compiler in your system to execute the C programs. Nowadays C and C++, both compilers come with a single integrated package, which provides the C and C++ program development.

C Compiler

A compiler is a computer program which transforms human-readable program into binary code which is machine-readable format. In simple terms, the compiler converts the code you wrote to the binary code that the computer can understand.

The human-readable program consists of digital letters, symbols, characters, etc and the machine-readable format consists of only 0’s and 1’s. The C program execution is based on the processor which is available in the CPU.

List of C Compilers

There are lots of C compilers available in the market and these are the most famous C compilers which are available for free:

• Turbo C
• Visual C++
• Oracle C++
• Portable C Compiler
• CSS C Compiler
• IBM C++
• Intel C++
• Clang C++

There are some paid C Compilers which has free trial versions such as:

• Green Hills C++
• Microsoft C++
• Paradigm C++
• HP C++ for Linux
• Embarcadero C++
• Edison Design Group C++

Installation on Windows

There are some C Compilers which comes with IDE such as

• 90-day free trial version of Visual Studio from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/
• Free IDE Codeblocks from http://www.codeblocks.org/downloads
• Dev-C++ IDE from http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html
• You can download MinGW http://www.mingw.org/

Installation on UNIX/Linux

In UNIX and Linux Machine, by default the most popular C Compiler GCC will be already available in your system. The code can be compiled with the command line commands such as cc or gcc

$gcc -v

If for some reason GCC is not installed in your machine, you can get it free from http://gcc.gnu.org/install/

Installation on MAC

The easiest way to get GCC compiler in Mac OS is to download  the Xcode development environment from https://developer.apple.com/xcode/

Once it is installed, you can start using GCC compiler for C/C++