When you first start learning C, you quickly find out that C is a compiled language. Compilation can feel like an extra step after writing the code, unlike, for example, JavaScript. In JS, you don’t need to compile anything manually - compilation happens under the hood, making the process feel automatic, so the language appears to simply interpret your code.

Compared to that, compilation in C can initially feel like an unnecessary and redundant step.

But recently, I accidentally went deeper into the topic of compilers, and it slightly shifted my understanding of C.

Have you ever noticed that the code written in C is the same, yet there are multiple compilers: gcc, clang, and so on? A natural question comes up - if the language is one, why does it need different compilers?

It turns out the key point is that a compiler translates code for specific hardware. This universality - a language built with portability across different architectures in mind - is exactly what made C so important in the first place. Since compilers are different, they can behave differently when compiling the same code:

• they report errors differently
• they produce warnings differently
• they optimize code differently

...while the source code itself remains the same. And for the same reason, data types in C can have different sizes - depending on the architecture and the compiler.

If you think about it, it’s a brilliant solution: the same code can be compiled for different hardware. That’s why C has so many compilers.