c-standard-popularity.md

C Standard Popularity

This table attempts to answer the question:

Roughly how popular are each of the C standards relative to each other?

Results

Standard	Hits	Query
c89	156k	"gcc -ansi" OR "-std=c89" OR "-std=c90" OR "-std=iso9899:1990" OR "-std=iso9899:199409" OR "-std=gnu89" OR "-std=gnu90"
c99	463k	"-std=c99" OR "-std=c9x" OR "-std=iso9899:1999" OR "-std=iso9899:199x"
c11	297k	"-std=c11" OR "-std=c1x" OR "-std=iso9899:2011" OR "-std=gnu11" OR "-std=gnu1x"
c17	21.6k	"-std=c17" OR "-std=c18" OR "-std=iso9899:2017" OR "-std=iso9899:2018" OR "-std=gnu17" OR "-std=gnu18"
c23	7.8k	"-std=c23" OR "-std=c2x" OR "-std=iso9899:2024" OR "-std=gnu23" OR "-std=gnu2x"
c2y (dev)	147	"-std=c2y" OR "-std=gnu2y"

Note

There's probably some bias here as proprietary/confidential 1st party C code is probably skewed towards using an older standard when compared to open source projects. These queries capture all valid -std= values for both GCC and Clang for C compilation.