Introduction

This is a (non-comprehensive) guide for JavaScript developers that are completely new to the C programming language. Some concepts and constructs translate fairly well between JavaScript and C, but which may be expressed differently, whereas others are a radical departure, like memory management. This guide provides a brief comparison and mapping of those constructs and concepts with concise examples.

The original authors¹ of this guide were themselves JavaScript developers who were completely new to C. It is the guide the authors wish they had when they started on their C journey. That said, the authors would encourage you to read books and other material available on the Web to embrace C and its idioms rather than attempting to learn it exclusively through the lens of JavaScript. Meanwhile, this guide can help answers some question quickly, like: Does C support inheritance, threading, asynchronous programming, etc.? Assumptions:

• Reader is a seasoned JavaScript developer.
• Reader is completely new to C.

Goals:

• Provide a brief comparison and mapping of various JavaScript topics to their counterparts in C.
• Provide links to C reference, book and articles for further reading on topics.

Non-goals:

• Discussion of design patterns and architectures.
• Tutorial on the C language.
• Reader is proficient in C after reading this guide.
• While there are short examples that contrast JavaScript and C code for some topics, this guide is not meant to be a cookbook of coding recipes in the two languages.

The adaption work is done by @DevScholar on GitHub.

This book contains artificial intelligence generated content, and the content is audited.