Installing C locally

Learn how to install C locally to solve Exercism's exercises on your own machine

The C language track requires that you have the following software installed on your system:

  • A modern C compiler
  • The Make build tool

Apple's Xcode IDE combines the compiler and the native build system into a single IDE (integrated development environment). Linux environments typically expose the compiler and native build system as separate command-line tools.

Linux

Linux users will need gcc or clang for the compiler, and make will be needed for the native build. Make is pre-installed on most unix systems, but is most likely available via your package manager. On Debian and Ubuntu based distributions everything you need can be installed with sudo apt-get install build-essential if not present.

MacOS

MacOS users can install gcc or clang with Homebrew via brew install gcc or brew install llvm.

Windows

Windows 10 users are recommended to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and proceed with the instruction for linux above.

If you are using an earlier version of Windows or WSL Bash is not available to you, you could use MSYS or mingw-w64.