In computer science, a library is a collection of read-only resources that is leveraged during software development to implement a computer program.
A woman working next to a filing cabinet containing the subroutine library on reels of punched tape for the EDSAC computer.
C is a general-purpose computer programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie, and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs. It has found lasting use in operating systems, device drivers, and protocol stacks, but its use in application software has been decreasing. C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems.
Dennis Ritchie (right), the inventor of the C programming language, with Ken Thompson
"Hello, World!" program by Brian Kernighan (1978)