[wordToDaBird]

You can do the VPS, and SSH thing.

As far as apps, I am not too sure what’s available, I know you can do swift playgrounds and that might have a C binding. (I checked there doesn’t seem to be a straightforward way to do C in swift playgrounds. Bonus content: https://github.com/uraimo/Awesome-Swift-Playgrounds )

What I do for most of my coding on iPad is use Google Colab. https://colab.research.google.com/

It’s a Jupyter Notebook, but you can get most things including working with C. The below link confirms C can be bound to and how.

https://blog.jupyter.org/interactive-workflows-for-c-with-ju...

As a matter of point, iPads aren’t really set up tool wise for programming. You can force something into this niche, but you probably want a computer for coding, because a significant portion of programming is massaging the system into doing what you need.