C3 is a system programming language based on C. It attempts to improve on C whilst retaining most of its syntax and semantics.

To get started, head over to c3-lang.org/getting-started.

Once you have the compiler on your system, go ahead and create a file hello.c3 with the following snippet and compile it using c3c compile hello.c3

import std::io;

fn void main()
{
    io::printfn("Hello World");
}

You can also create project by running c3c init project-name. To build it, first cd into the newly created directory then run c3c build.

If you are familiar with C you’ll notice a few differences. C3 uses the fn keyword to declare functions. It also introduces modules, in the example above we import std::io in order to use io::printfn.

Note: all my upcoming posts on C3 will assume the latest version of the compiler so if the examples don’t compile then please refer to c3-lang.org/getting-started/compile on how to build the compiler from source.