How to start a C project in VS 2015

Question

I have Visual Studio 2015, and I was wondering if it supports C.

I press on "New Project" and the options are Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual Basic.

I was wondering if I could compile a C programm or do one in VS. Does it have a C compiler ?

I am lost.

Thanks in Advance.

Solution 1

Create a visual c++ project.

Just rename your source file from .cpp to .c

No special conversions required. Just type your valid c code and it will compile just fine.

Solution 2

You can either do as Douglas DeTellem has suggested (Simply start a C++ project, change the extension to ".c", and just use their C++ compiler (C++, is of course, a superset of C), or you can try downloading MinGW (http://www.mingw.org/) and installing the Windows version of gcc, which supports the old C standard.

If you really want an IDE, try looking at Codeblocks (http://www.codeblocks.org). If you pick the download with MinGW, it will include the C compiler, and help you.

I tend to prefer using a text editor (in my case, gVim) and using a command prompt to run gcc, or cl (the Visual Studio command line call to the compiler and linker) to compile my programs.

Comments

[too honest for this site]

You cannot compile standard compliant code with MSVC. That compiler does only support the much outdated and not standard C90 version.

[IInspectable]

C++ is not a superset of C. C and C++ are different programming languages. A valid C program is not necessarily valid C++, e.g. char* p = malloc(42); - being valid C code - will not compile as C++. Visual Studio does come with a C compiler, though. As far as I know, it doesn't (fully) support C99 or C11.