C: The No-Bullshit Language for Tired Developers

Sometimes you just want to get shit done. Maybe it’s 2am, the deadline’s tomorrow, and you’re staring bleary-eyed at a vague spec. Rust is shiny and safe, but when you’re exhausted (or just lazy), wrestling with the borrow checker isn’t on the menu. In those dark hours, plain old C becomes your pragmatic hero. It’s fast, portable, and the toolchain is as simple as gcc foo.c -o foo. You write something that works, and move on – safety warnings be damned.

In fact, C’s strengths are exactly what you need when time and mental energy are in short supply. Its straightforward compiled performance rivals assembly, it runs on virtually any hardware (from microcontrollers to servers), and you don’t have to babysit a complex compiler. In the right context, C’s low-level freedom and minimal overhead can actually boost productivity: no cargo dependencies, no strict lifetime rules, just you, some pointers, and a clear goal.

Let’s cut the sugarcoating: while Rust’s memory safety and modern tooling are great – if you have the bandwidth for them – C still rules when you’re scribbling quick hacks, gluing system tools together, or sneaking code into legacy binaries. This article dives deep into when and why C wins the day for experienced devs who just want to ship, iterate fast, or make hardware do their bidding – without wrestling with excessive compiler safeties.

Blazing-Fast Performance (Because You Need It Yesterday)

C’s execution speed is legendary. Compiled C code runs close to the metal, with performance comparable to assembly. In practical terms, that means your loops and bit-twiddling run at peak efficiency, with almost zero abstraction overhead. When raw throughput or tight resource budgets matter, C is nearly unbeatable. For example, critical system components (like OS kernels) and high-performance servers are traditionally written in C for exactly this reason.

“C is a fast, portable language… with the advantages of both low-level and high-level languages,” notes a systems programming primer.  In other words, you get direct memory access and pointer math and standard libraries – lightning speed, with just enough convenience.

Even today, many mission-critical tools are C programs for performance’s sake. Web servers and daemons like Apache, Postfix, Redis, and Memcached are written in C/C++ and optimized to handle massive loads as Linux daemons. In graphics and scientific computing, C/C++ still dominate for raw throughput (think video frames in VFX plugins, or GPU drivers, or optimized math libraries). If you need a job done fast, C’s bare-metal heritage pays off.

“As compelling as new languages like Rust are… C and C++ remain fundamental for writing applications that run close to the metal,” writes InfoWorld’s Serdar Yegulalp. In practice, that means C code often squeaks out higher frame rates, higher packet rates, or lower latency than higher-level code – exactly what you need when every cycle counts.

Key point: C compiles to minimal, efficient machine code by design. There are no hidden GC pauses or runtime type checks. A standards-compliant C program can be built for almost any platform with very few changes, and the compiler does only essential optimizations. In scenarios where you just must have predictably fast execution (or meet size/speed constraints), C is your friend. It’s why game engines, embedded real-time code, and high-frequency trading systems often fall back to C (or C++) even today.

Ubiquitous Portability and a Simple Toolchain

Another huge win for C: everywhere and in minutes. C compilers exist for practically every CPU and OS, from tiny 8-bit microcontrollers up to supercomputers. If you’re targeting an obscure board or an old UNIX box, you can be confident a C compiler is installed or easily available. By contrast, new languages like Rust may need toolchain bootstrapping or might not even support your platform yet.

This universal support means you can write “portable” code that just compiles and runs without wrestling with complex build systems. One Wikipedia summary notes that C was designed with portability in mind: “a C program written with portability in mind can be compiled for a wide variety of platforms and operating systems with few changes”. In practice, you often just write cc source.c -o program and you’re done.

The simplicity of C’s toolchain is a massive productivity win under pressure. You don’t need to fiddle with package managers or dependency graphs – there is no package manager. The entire C standard library is compact, and you mostly rely on well-known C APIs. This stands in sharp contrast with Rust’s build system. While Cargo is powerful, it can introduce compile-time overhead and dependency complexity. (One Rust user quipped that switching certain projects to Rust could “turn build time into hours” due to its overhead.)

In fact, experienced devs often note that C just compiles way faster than Rust. As one forum post put it bluntly: “C compiles much faster than Rust, so that might also be a concern for some.” When you want to try out a change or debug on the fly, waiting on rustc isn’t fun. With C, even a large codebase compiles in seconds or minutes, not hours. And for tiny tools or scripts, you can use ultra-fast compilers like TCC (Tiny C Compiler) which literally compile and run a C program “in a split second” – so fast you can treat C like a scripting language if needed.

Portability advantage: C compilers target virtually every architecture and OS (Linux, Windows, embedded chips, you name it). No VM or runtime needed.

Toolchain simplicity: Writing C often means a single source file and one compiler command. No manifest editing, no building a dependency tree.

Fast builds: Modern C compilers are highly optimized, and tools like ccache or TCC can make iteration blazingly quick. You get instant feedback, which is gold when deadlines loom.

In short: when you just need to ship something that builds, C’s minimalism pays off.

Quick-and-Dirty Scripting with C

Yes, you heard that right: C as a “scripting” language. It sounds crazy, but with tiny compilers and a little boilerplate you can get scripts out quicker than bootstrapping a Python or Node.js project. Tools like TCC and Cpi make this possible. For example, TCC’s author boasts that C applications can compile so fast under it “in a split second, fast enough that you could use C apps as scripts.” Need to hack a small data processor or a quick CGI web handler? You can toss together a C program, compile & run it, and you’re done. No interpreter overhead, just raw execution.

Even without special compilers, C often beats dynamic languages on raw speed. One comparison notes: “C generally outperforms Python in execution speed because C is closer to machine code”. So if your “script” is doing heavy number crunching or low-level work, a little C program might actually be easier to run quickly than optimizing a Python script or installing some runtime. Combine that with TCC or similar, and you have all the power of C plus the immediacy of a script.

Some bullet points on quick-and-dirty use cases:

Tiny web service or CGI handler: Libraries like kCGI let you handle HTTP requests in C almost as easily as in higher-level web frameworks, with minimal overhead. If raw speed is vital (say, handling thousands of requests a second), a C CGI script can outperform heavier setups.

File-processing jobs: Need to massage logs or binary data quickly? A small C program can parse and transform gigabytes of text in seconds – no “pip install” or VM startup time. The classic Unix toolbox is full of tiny C programs (grep, sed, awk, etc.) that do exactly this.

One-off CLI tools: Perhaps the simplest example: wrote a quick C program instead of fiddling with bash? If it’s something simple (iterate a file, call a library, spit out text), sometimes typing a few lines of C and running it is more straightforward than wrestling with shell quoting or learning a new language’s syntax.

The secret sauce here is that compilation is cheap and predictable for C. Even if you just need a short-lifetime tool, you won’t spend minutes installing or configuring runtimes. You write, compile, run, and delete – and you still get a binary that runs fast enough to justify the approach. For a tired developer on a deadline, being able to do all of that with a single gcc (or tcc) invocation is a godsend.

System-Level Tinkering and Daemons

C shines even more when you’re dealing with system internals and networking. Because C has direct access to system calls and memory, it’s traditionally used for writing utilities, daemons, and tools that live close to the OS. Think of custom logging filters, network packet sniffers, filesystem watchers – a lot of these are still easiest to do in C because you can include <sys/socket.h>, <netinet/ip.h>, or assembler snippets without fuss.

Major network daemons and system services are written in C/C++ for this reason. As one tech post notes, typical server software includes “Apache, MySQL, MongoDB, Postfix, Redis, Memcache” – all running as Linux daemons. Many of these began in C, leveraging its lean binaries. If you need to extend or stub out such a daemon, you’re likely doing it in C anyway (or interfacing with a C API). In practice, most low-level libraries expose a C interface, and most OS APIs are C-based.

“I had to make [a] decision for a network daemon recently, and ended up choosing C because almost every library implements a C interface,” one developer reported.  In short, with network daemons or sysadmin tools, C is the path of least resistance. You avoid the impedance mismatch of calling C functions from other languages, and you keep the deployment footprint small.

Because C has essentially zero runtime (no garbage collector, no hidden thread scheduler, etc.), your tools can be bulletproof lean. A tiny daemon written in C can occupy just a few kilobytes of RAM and do I/O in milliseconds. This matters in constrained environments like routers, IoT gateways, or just overworked servers. Sometimes you just need to spin up a socket, do a couple of operations, and spit something back – and C lets you do that with minimal ceremony.

Examples and real-world scenarios:

A data-center engineer might bash out a custom cache poisoning detector in C that sits in front of a binary protocol. The C program can poll network packets with select() or epoll(), parse them byte-by-byte, and make decisions in real time. No safety check gets in the way.

Graphics/animation teams often write small rendering plugins or utilities in C/C++ because they need raw speed and they don’t care if a plugin segfaults (they just restart it). As one VFX developer joked, “Rapid iteration is very important [in VFX], and safety/maintainability are relatively unimportant. Given those priorities, I can see why C is a decent choice.”

Modifying kernel modules, writing bootloaders, or tweaking drivers – you do this in C. (Rust is just arriving in the kernel, but for now C is the de facto choice for any code that really needs bare-metal agility.)

In these system-level contexts, the low-level control and tiny overhead of C code give you maximum flexibility. You can read and write raw memory, bang out inline assembly, and even bypass the type system if you want. Yes, it’s dangerous – but in many of these scenarios, dangerous is the point. If you hit a bug, it usually just stops your process (or bubbles into your existing system logs), and you can reboot or restart. That trade-off is often worth it to meet deadlines or hardware constraints.

Embedded Programming: Control the Hardware

When it comes to embedded systems, C is practically the lingua franca. Microcontrollers and chip vendors typically provide only C drivers and libraries. As one embedded developer notes, they “like using Rust for all things… but sometimes the vendor provides a set of libs + examples which are always in C, and in that case I would go for that for a quick prototype.”. In other words, if you have some off-the-shelf IoT board and the only SDK is in C, you’d be foolish to fight it at 3am – you just code in C.

This happens all the time: even modern ecosystems like Arduino or STM32Cube emit C boilerplate to start up timers, handle interrupts, or set up peripherals. If your colleagues handed you a handful of C headers and example programs, you grab the C compiler and go. C’s ability to manipulate specific memory addresses (e.g. *(volatile uint32_t *)0x40004400 = 0x1;) is unmatched by most higher-level languages. It’s sometimes literally the only way to talk to the hardware registers you need.

And because embedded devices usually have very tight memory and CPU limits, C’s minimal footprint is a blessing. Embedded C code can run on a few kilobytes of RAM with no virtual memory – try doing that in Rust or Go. This is not an excuse, it’s reality: many tiny controllers cannot run Rust’s runtime yet (even Rust proponents admit much of that code would be in unsafe anyway). So if you’re hacking a firmware update or sensor interface, C’s low-overhead binary and deterministic behavior are exactly what you want.

In short, when “ship a feature now” means “blink LEDs or drive a motor without a runtime”, C is the obvious answer. It’s why embedded development has remained C-dominated for decades. The language is designed for this: it promises minimal runtime, direct memory access, and cheap linking to hardware APIs.

Freedom from the Compiler (for Good and Bad)

One of C’s biggest draws – and biggest nightmares – is the utter freedom it gives you. There’s no borrow checker yelling at you, no enforced lifetimes or ownership rules. You can cast pointers, index memory arbitrarily, and alias things to your heart’s content. This lack of strict compiler safety is precisely why C can feel like a productivity win when you just need something working quickly.

To be clear, this is a double-edged sword. It is easy to shoot yourself in the foot with C (buffer overruns, memory leaks, null dereferences, etc.), and tools like Rust exist largely to prevent those. But in the contexts we’re talking about – vague requirements, one-off scripts, performance wins – many teams are willing to accept those risks. After all, even Rust admits it has an “unsafe” escape hatch for precisely the things C does: pointer juggling, low-level optimizations, and so on. Sometimes you’d rather have no guardrail and race, than stall behind safety checks.

Consider an analogy: trying to force someone writing an after-hours hotfix to memorize Rust’s borrow-checker rules is like making a racecar driver solve differential equations mid-lap. It breaks the flow. As one programmer put it, “to be a highly productive Rust programmer, you basically have to memorize the borrow checker rules” – a prospect that feels absurd when all you need is a quick loop that (temporarily) violates typical aliasing rules. In C, you don’t even get a warning – you just write the code and hope for the best.

And often the best is enough. If the boss says “just wire it up and we’ll fix the bugs later,” C responds with a shrug. You can leak memory on a quick daemon, hope the allocator doesn’t overflow, and come back tomorrow. That kind of “reckless pragmatism” is exactly why some shops still reach for C. One commentator candidly observes that people turn to C for its “simplicity”, even though it means deferring logic errors to runtime. In their words, Rust’s fixes have made C++ safer, but even safe C++ is still more cumbersome than just hacking in C.

In real terms, this flexibility looks like:

Opaque pointers: Need to shove a struct through a syslog socket? C says “here’s a (void *) – do what you want.” No need to define traits or generics for it.

Manual memory: Want to allocate a giant buffer and never free it (for quick’n’dirty speed)? Sure, go ahead. In the short term, it’s faster than boxing every collection or wrestling with lifetimes.

Minimal safety checks: C will happily let you reinterpret bytes, skip bounds checks, or shoot a null pointer into orbit (best done one instruction at a time). In the “just make it work” mindset, that’s sometimes a feature.

Of course, this is not free. Every C program is riding on the hope that your code is correct (or at least tolerably so). But a reality check: even in Rust, unsafe blocks are a fact of life in low-level code, and you can still get runtime panics or subtle bugs. C just puts the onus on you from the start. Many developers find that acceptable when, say, they’re racing through an embedded proof-of-concept or gluing libraries together under a brutal deadline.

“Writing very low-level software just works with C, where Rust just kind of isn’t there yet,” remarks one embedded systems coder. When dealing with static memory, interrupts, or memory-mapped I/O, C’s permissiveness isn’t a bug – it’s a necessity. You can absolutely cause a kernel panic or a flashlight with C, but sometimes that’s exactly how you boot an OS or drive a motor.

In short: C’s lack of compiler-enforced safety can be a productivity feature in certain contexts. It means you’re free to violate “correctness” rules for a quick experiment. It means “just get the bytes over the wire ASAP” without boilerplate. It means when you’re out of brainpower, you can lean on raw control.

When You Should Still Love Rust (But Use C Anyway)

Before you accuse me of heresy, yes – Rust is awesome. Its strict compiler really does prevent many classes of bugs, and in a big, new project it’s usually the safer bet. The Rust community has every reason to evangelize it. As one source puts it plainly: “The main argument to using Rust over C is safety.”

But in practice, experienced devs know that the perfect language rarely exists. The real world has messy constraints: legacy systems written in C, half-finished requirements, tooling quirks, or simply that you (or your teammate) are literally too tired to refactor a borrowing graph at midnight. In those cases, C’s enduring pragmatism wins the day.

Legacy codebases: If you’re patching a decades-old C library or OS, rewriting in Rust can be an enormous task. C is the path of least resistance.

Greenfield with veterans: Even on new projects, if the team is stacked with C veterans under time pressure, they often default to what they know. As one comment noted, if everyone’s been coding C for 20–30 years and the clock is ticking, “C is the obvious choice”.

Minimalism over safety: Some environments (tiny microcontrollers, early boot code, absurd optimization targets) simply can’t afford the size or overhead of Rust’s runtime or abstractions. In those niche cases, you “ship” in C. One hobbyist trying to pack a program under 15KB for a DOS boot floppy found that any Rust binary far overshot the target, so C was the only way.

Remember, saying “C is great when lazy” is not an endorsement of bad practices long-term. It’s an acknowledgment of a trade-off: sometimes iterating fast and controlling every byte is more important than absolute code safety. A well-placed disclaimer: you are responsible for that safety, not the compiler. But many seasoned devs find that an acceptable gamble when stakes are low or when the alternative is never shipping.

Conclusion: Ship It or Blink It

At the end of the day, C isn’t going away, nor should it. It’s the Swiss Army knife of systems programming: reliable, ubiquitous, and brutally straightforward. For tired or lazy moments when you just want code on disk by tomorrow, C is the language that has your back – no bullshit.

We’ve seen how C’s raw performance, universal portability, and lean toolchain allow for fast iteration and tiny deployments. It’s the go-to for quick scripting hacks, small daemons, and embedded glue. Its flexibility and lack of enforced safety can even be an advantage when “getting it done” is the priority.

This isn’t to say Rust (and other modern languages) aren’t fantastic – they definitely are for many projects. Rust brings guaranteed memory safety and a rich ecosystem. But remember: language choice is tool choice. Sometimes the right tool for the job is the one that gets the job done right now. And for many late-night, vague-spec coding sprints, C remains that tool.

So next time you’re staring bleary-eyed at a computer, weighing Rust’s borrow rules against the clock, consider reaching for C. Embrace its rawness. Write the code that might blow up, ship it, and fix it later. We promise, experienced devs will understand. After all, in the real world of deadlines and legacy systems, pragmatism wins.

Sources: C’s strengths in speed, portability, and simplicity are well documented. Developer discussions also highlight that Rust’s safe modernity comes with trade-offs in compile time and flexibility. Embedded and system programmers frequently note that vendor libraries and real-time constraints often force the issue – C is just easier. (Cited references are embedded above.)