UKC

Can anyone recommend me a simple, free, C compiler, please?

I'm trying to remind myself of my C skills and it's been a long time since I've used one.

Thanks,

How about onlinegdb which is web based and quick to access.

Is it c or c++ or both you're looking for?

Visual studio community is free and at the powerful end of things. Visual Code is also another free option.

Apologies these are both c++ compilers not c, but depending on what you're doing this might not be an issue.

Microsoft visual studio community would be my top suggestion. I haven't used this for a long time, it used to be called 'Visual Studio Express' but seems to have been rebranded. I still use the paid version though for work from time to time and IDEs don't really get much better than this in my experience.

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/

A good alternative would be Dev C++

https://www.bloodshed.net/

Thanks - I've actually got Visual Studio Professional 2019 on my laptop, as I'm dabbling with C#.NET at work, but wanted something simple and command line for tinkering with a standalone bit of C.

I'll try running it through VS 2019 and see what happens.

If you have installed the c module for VS then you will be able to run the compiler from the command line rather than launching the IDE.

I'd go for Bloodshed too, dead easy to use no issues with projects and hard to follow user interfaces.

Assuming you only want the compiler, you didn't mention an ide you can just install gcc on Windows as a command line tool and it'll compile both c and c++ as required. Uses cygwin.

https://gcc.gnu.org/install/binaries.html

Clang or GCC.

Microsoft do not make a C compiler. MSVC is a C++ compiler as you will rapidly discover if you try to compile strict C code.

gcc

After posting, I found I'd got Visual C++ installed, but that just throws up loads of errors on my C code.

I have no idea what any of this means . . . . .

Make sure you're setting the compiler to C and not C++, despite the similarities they are not always entirely cross compatible.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibility_of_C_and_C%2B%2B

You may, or may not, be able to compile C code with MSVC. It supports the C89 standard, and has some support for C99 and C11 but is buggy and not fully compliant.

For a frustration-free experience you will be better of with GCC or Clang.

Clang can be used from within the Visual C++ environment.

How the heck do you change that - I can't see an obvious option?

You don't need to. If your source file ends in .c it will compile as C.

Look for something like "Developer Command Prompt for Vs 2019" in the Windows menu Visual Studio folder and run that.

Then make a file called test.c containing the following standard program [wikipedia]:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
printf("hello, world");
}

Enter "cl test.c" in the Command Prompt. That should compile without errors. Then run test.exe

edit: The ukc editor removes backslashes from text :/ Normally world would have backslash n after it in order to insert a newline.

Not sure I'm afraid, I don't write C very often, and when I do I use `gcc`

However some light googling shows

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/compiling-a-c-cpp-prog....

Or as freeflyer says, making sure your extension is .c

This page looks like it might be helpful for what you're trying to achieve too

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/walkthrough-compile-a-c-program-...

How annoying. \n

Clang/LLVM.  Far more informative error messages and displayed with great clarity on a terminal (as the OP indicated they’re looking to work from).

Haha I've no idea how you did that. However seeing as posting code in ukc isn't really a thing, I'm not so worried ... Occasionally it also seems to remove anything in angle brackets, presumably in some desperate attempt to avoid html injection etc.

Backslash seems to be an escape character, so double backslash works.  \\ -> \

Is the correct answer

You don't say what your motivation is for reminding yourself about C (a dubious enterprise which has however earned me a substantial amount of money over the years).

If it's career-related, it may be worth taking a look at Rust, which is making the language fanbois so excited, and has caused Linus to observe cautiously that Rust is "the first language I saw which looked like this might actually be a solution".

GCC is the obvious choice, available, free on many platforms.

On no account be tempted to use the compiler that comes with the Death Station 2000.

You think we should allow HTML injection?

gcc - look no further

Haha the "desperation" referred to the issue that sometimes it removed the angle bracket stdio.h angle bracket in my C code post above, and sometimes it didn't!

Slack and the like have a code snippet block which allows unformatted unsanitised text to be posted, but as I suggested earlier, it seems less likely that anyone will need to be posting code snippets of any kind on the forum, so I'm thinking there are no user requirements and whatever you're doing in the way of security should be driven by proper threat detection and removal. UI isn't really my thing so I don't have much knowledge of what gets used commercially, sorry.

What about a paid service offering an API access to people wanting to run hundreds of accounts?  He says, casting a critical eye over this thread…

With reference to discussions about posting code, I’d far rather have an option to put latex in a post and have it rendered inline as an image…. Probably a sign that some threads belong on Stack Overflow instead…