 C can also be used for website programming using CGI as a "gateway" for information between the Web application, the server, and the browser.C is often chosen over interpreted languages because of its speed, stability, and near-universal availability.One consequence of C's wide availability and efficiency is that compilers, libraries and interpreters of other programming languages are often implemented in C. The reference implementations of Python, Perl and PHP, for example, are all written in C.

Because the layer of abstraction is thin and the overhead is low, C enables programmers to create efficient implementations of algorithms and data structures, useful for computationally intense programs.