Yes well those two thoughts, I thought, were pretty much what you wrote when you started the thread.

I think it is a very common question that people raise when they don't feel they know "any" language as well as they feel they should.

But honestly, over time you may feel, as I do, that all languages are highly similar, so the syntax isn't the biggest concern. Just like you mentioned, some are better for different things, or different environments.

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For the Linux command line GDB is a great debugger. You can use it through emacs, and there are some debug interfaces which employ GDB, but make it all look more like an IDE.

My debugging blogs in my signature cover some info on how to use GDB.

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Thanks. I have signatures turned off, but I'll research GDB.

When people have blog entries there's also a link to the left which will bring you to their top blog page.

Just wondering why you can't use libraries like curl to do Internet connection in C. I've seen several interpreted languages that use curl underneath to do that. I've written a few programs that use Berkeley sockets to connect to the Internet. It's fairly straightforward to work with and if you're careful what functionality you use, somewhat portable across different operating systems.

If you need some libraries to help speed up the writing process in C (since most other languages use several libraries/modules/plugins, etc.), there are some interesting resources available for C. One interesting trend in C programming is the proliferation of single file and minimal libraries. You can check out projects like https://github.com/clibs/clib/wiki/Packages which try to catalog them and make them easier to incorporate in projects. If the libraries are small and readable, it's a good way to see how others solve a particular problem and whether you want to incorporate a similar solution or try something different.

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I haven't even run across the need to use valgrind yet. gdb is good and you can build it with a ncurses/pdcurses front-end. I like CodeLite as a cross-platform GUI debugger. On Windows using MinGW, there's Dr. MinGW and StraceNT. Linux offers strace. There are several programs that let you check for memory leaks including Dr. Memory, dmalloc, electric fence, etc. There are also tools like gprof that let you know what parts of your program are taking the most time to run.

Thanks for your response, lm8.

A lot of my projects involve gathering data from an API or scraping a website. Doing this in C, I found, was extremely difficult. Meanwhile, in Go, I can use BeautifulSoup , one of my favorite libraries ever, to get exactly what I need, while using the language's http module from its excellent standard library. I use to do this in Python but have since switched to Go.

Thanks! I'll give this a read. I've been trying to find small web-based programs in C that I can scan. I'm still learning to read C code and jumping into massive projects is intimidating.

This might be worth checking into for accessing the web:
https://github.com/curl/fcurl

Go was built by Google whose main business is http/networking. It just makes sense it shines in that aspect

Thanks. I read through the project and it seems promising. Though, my only concern is it hasn't been updated in three years. Nice to know there's a libcurl wrapper.

After our discussion yesterday, I spent the day writing a C program that interacts with Dictionary.com's API. The program uses basic libcurl GET functions and cJSON to work with the JSON response. The latter library was a lot easier to use than I expected. The only issue I had was needing to clean up arrays of word definitions (removing quotation marks and extra spacing). It was a fun challenge, and I plan to put it out there for those who get their own API keys and want a quick dictionary on the command line.

Indeed. It's been my go-to language for interacting with the web. I just like the challenge of working with http GET requests in C, as that is what most of my work consists of.

I wrote above about writing a program in C to get and parse JSON data. I'm curious to see how I can expand to create a BeautifulSoup-like program for C.

Language choices hardly matter from a technical standpoint, most of them are well developed enough that they can do pretty much anything.

The question is the human part involved :

Do you want to maintain the project for years to come?
Do you need 100% control of your program (you can't have a sudden disruption by the GC)?
Do you just want to learn or develop as a programmer?

Personally, I try to choose the right language for the job, but I find it hard to escape the apish nature of having an allegiance and disgust of other unfamiliar language (high level languages like Ruby, JS etc etc)