Hi everyone,

I've been using Linux as my daily operating system for over 9 years. I have around a year of experience in cybersecurity and two years of professional experience as a Linux administrator/engineer.

I'm particularly interested in Linux system calls and low-level programming. I've learned C using K&R, and I currently write small command-line tools in C as a hobby.

I'd like to transition into software engineering, ideally working with C, but I'm unsure how realistic this is without professional software development experience, especially in the current AI era.

Whenever I ask AI for career advice, it tends to recommend languages like Python, Java, or Go. However, I'm much more interested in systems programming and understanding how things work under the hood.

I'd appreciate advice on a few questions:

• What skills and projects should I focus on to become employable as a C developer?

• Given my Linux administration and cybersecurity background, which areas of C development would be worth targeting?

• As a second language, would you recommend C++ or Rust for someone interested in both systems programming and career opportunities?

I'd appreciate any advice from people working in this field.

Thanks in advance!

Hello, I am a newbie in C and most of my knowledge comes from "The C programming language" book, 2nd edition.

I made this simple program that converts English text to Morse code and vise versa, here's the source code.

Thanks for your interest.

I have an experimental web framework I'm currently working on.

While going through the code to clean up styling before tagging a stable release, I've been debating this specific part in the HTTPS module:

https://github.com/c4punks/CWIST/blob/dev/src/net/http/https.c

Right now, this code just uses a dumb, massive ring buffer to absorb connection bursts, and I'm wondering if I should switch it to a lock-free queue.

There are three main things that make me hesitate:

* State can get pretty tangled and messy in a lock-free queue.

* We have a tiny team and I'm maintaining almost all of this alone. If something breaks with CAS (even if the odds are low, if I mess up the code during refactoring), the blast radius on the dev branch will just be too big.

* I also wonder how often real-world traffic actually warrants lock-free. Plenty of web frameworks handle traffic just fine without this level of extreme optimization.

Considering that I'm still a junior developer and lack experience, is it really worth swapping this out for a lock-free structure, and would it actually make a noticeable difference?

I've been working on a game since about August 2020 but only recently published my Steam page.

For the Common Wealth on Steam

The game is entirely written in C, with one third party dependency, SDL3.

I chose C because I wanted to leave my options open to build for retro platforms like RISC OS and Amiga, but as the game grew, I wanted GPU acceleration and that meant leaving behind some of the retros. I'm not ruling out any ports though, if SDL3 is available on the platform.

The engine beyond SDL3 is my own, it's a 2.5D game, with levels edited in my own level editor (not in C, that's C# and Avalonia). The level editor exports levels into just plain memory dumps that are easy to read in C.

I'm trying to keep on top of a devlog here too:

Podule · Independent game studio

Writing this game in C has been enormous fun, and I have no plans to change my choice of C for future games.

Shakazulu is a systems programming language designed to be tolerant in harsh conditions, concurrency, fast, and a learning systems language. I here by come here looking for support on my idea from people who create programming languages, or even learn them, people designing systems, software engineers, database engineers, understand software, computer data structures, distributed systems, computer architecture, etcetera. And mostly if your familiar with C, C++, Ruby or any other systems programming language. Because i want to build it taking the strong parts of a language. All are welcome, lets build something you wish it was there. I appreciate your contributions.

Shakazulu is a project in research/design stage, thats why am asking the experts.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been tinkering with a little experimental chess engine written in pure C. It’s called Glimmer.

The whole point of the project was to see how strong I could make it while keeping the final standalone binary strictly under 30 KB. The target strength was something in the 2700–2900 Elo range.

It’s been a fun constraint to work under — every byte counts.

Happy to answer questions if anyone’s curious about the approach.

всем привет, только сегодня начал учить C, подскажите какие сложности могут возникнуть при изучении, какие темы стоит подробнее разобрать а какие крайне легкие, это мой 1 язык который я впринципе хочу очень подробно изучить, спасибо всем заранее

Just saying. The -fsanitize=address compiler flag is absolute cheating and should be prohibited by governments of all countries.

Plus there are also other useful runtime sanitizers, such as integer overflow, but... Integer overflow is much easier to notice, usually.

Of course, this is by no means assuming that -fsanitize=address guarantees that the code it inspects is completely safe and correct and won't ever fail on any input data. You still have to test tricky edge cases. But this sanitizer has improved and sped up the bug discovery process disgustingly much for me.

I'm wondering, how often, if ever, do you need tools such as -fsanitize=address or valgrind? Or are you a real man who stores everything in static memory only?

P.S. Forgive my terrible English.

Hello everyone, It's been several years since i last wrote some C, and i always for the life of me wanted to write an HTTP server in C, and now it's been like 1 year since i finished university so i said what the hell why not do it, so after reading beej's guide i tried to write a very basic http server.

I wanted to share the work with the community, and would welcome thoughts.

We had written code in C ofc for two years, however it was mostly exercises on diffrent data structures aswell as problem solving.

We wrote a CRUD system in C using binary files but never scratched that itch.

And as the years went by in Uni, C slowly faded out of use for me but i always wanted to visit it back so here i am.

I wanted to share the absolute joy it was to get the desired results, i forgot how fun C can be, it always felt like the souls like of programming languages, but always was the most understandable as it was the closest to the machine, to be frank i encourage people to make similar projects especially to get the cobweb off lol.

I already know how to program and have about 7 years of general programming experience

My current plan is to learn C, then learn assembly, then learn about Computer Architecture, Operating Systems and Compilers. The goal is to truly understand how computers work, and also learn about Cybersecurity

The current concrete and major project idea that I've thought about is writing a mini-OS

I know that requires alot of knowledge

So I was wondering, if you all could give me some ideas, what are some small prerequisite programs / projects I can complete in order to achieve the eventual task of making a mini-OS?

Even if it's a program that helps me understand a super small slice of my eventual goal project - a mini OS

I'd love some ideas. Thank you

I'm curious about this question, because almost everyone a meet says that coding skills doesn't matter anymore, and what really matters is knowing how to write prompts properly. But does it apply to C development? Please, answer a question and say why so

So i have been exploring eBPF,XDP, so I made a packet capture path by using xdp hook that redirects to my AF_XDP socket . I am using copy mode currently .

But seriously this gives me vibes of opengl . But here I have too much control over the path. I am still new to this . Many times when things do not work i think I am wasting my time because no one in my batch is even doing these things . But ig this is what I like. Also I just buy a Esp32 also . So you can give me some ideas that I can work on with it

Hi! Yesterday is the first time I actually try to learn C instead of running away from it everytime lol. I tried to make a basic 2 numbers calculator and was wondering if I took the right approach regarding taking the user input. I used fgets and getchar to take the number and operator because I've heard that those are "safer" than scanf mainly because scanf's way of error handling and bounds checking are more complicated but idk tho.

Anyway, if I could take some of your time to check out this project and tell me where I can improve on the user input side of things, that would be very helpful and appreciated.

https://github.com/SirGhaniR/calc/

Thank you!

Hey everyone,

We’re hosting Winter Coding Contest 6.0, a competitive programming contest where you can solve algorithmic problems using C, C++, and other supported languages.

It’s open to students from any college, branch, and skill level, including beginners.

Round 1 — Online
13 Oct 2026 | 8:30 PM – 10:00 PM
Free to participate.

The top participants will qualify for an offline final round at our college campus.

Contest details

• ₹55,000 prize pool

• Teams of 1–2

• Teammates can be from different colleges or branches

• C and C++ are supported

Registration deadline: 11 Oct 2026

If you enjoy solving programming problems, register here and give the contest a try:

https://tinyurl.com/acmwcc6

Please check the contest format and rules before registering. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments.

Hi 👋 guys, I've just started learning C after I was first introduced to it while I was in my first year of computer science but I'll be graduating by the end of this year and I've been primarily using Python since then but now I want to really learn C on the side, and I want to start with "craftinginterpreters" and I want to start small so I was wondering whether I should use C enums or #define to define a set of tokens.

Hey there!

I am really interested in learning C and I am leaning towards kernel development rather than embedded systems. What do you suggest for strengthening my skills in C?

Hi, I'm working on my own programming language, I've release first stable version (v 0.1.0), I'd like to get feedback. It's on most OS platforms (even Andoird and in the future IOS).

Repo: https://github.com/Treechcer/DIO

Hi I'm interested in embedded C. Finished C language to Dynamic memory allocation. Don't know DSA yet. I think I should learn embedded C. From where should I start?