Java vs. C and C++: Key Differences Explained

Introduction to C, C++, and Java :

C is a general-purpose high-level language that was originally developed by Dennis Ritchie in 1972 for the Unix operating system. C is a successor of B language which was introduced around 1970. C is a structured language which is easy to learn and produces efficient programs. it`s a top-down approach. It can handle low-level activities and can be compiled on a variety of computers. Today C is the most widely used System Programming Language.

C++ is a general purpose programming language developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell Labs, designed to make programming more enjoyable for the serious programmers.C++ is a superset of the C programming language. In addition to the facilities provided by C, C++ provides flexible and efficient facilities for defining new types. The key concept in C++ is class. A class is a user defined type.

Java is a programming language created by James Gosling from Sun Microsystems in 1991. The first publicly available version of Java (Java 1.0) was released in 1995. The Old name of Java was Oak. Java is now taken by Oracle corporation.The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation was completed by Oracle in January 2010.The current version of Java is Java 1.7 ( Java 7 ). Java is a Programming language as well as a Platform itself.

Although Java was modeled after C and C++ languages, it differs from C and C++ in many ways. Java does not incorporate a number of features available in C and C++. For the benefit of C and C++ programmers, we point out here a few major differences between C/C++ and Java language.

Java also adds some new features, while C++ is a superset of C, Java is neither a superset nor a subset of C or C++.

Java and C

Java is not lot like C but the major difference between Java and C is that Java is an object-oriented language and has a mechanism to define classes and objects. In an effort to build a simple and safe language, the Java team did not include some of the C features in Java.

1. Java does not include the C unique statement keywords size of and typedef.
2. Java does not contain the data type struct and union.
3. Java does not define the type modifiers keywords auto, extern, register, signed, and unsigned.
4. Java does not support an explicit pointer type.
5. Java does not have a preprocessor and therefore we cannot use # define, # include, and # ifdef statements.
6. Java requires that the functions with no arguments must be declared with empty parenthesis and not with the void keyword as done in C.
7. Java adds new operators such as instanceof and >>>.
8. Java adds labelled break and continue statements.
9. Java adds many features required for object-oriented programming.

Java and C++

Java is a true object-oriented language while C++ is basically C with object-oriented extension. That is what exactly the increment operator ++ indicates. C++ has maintained backward compatibility with C. Is is, therefore, possible to write an old style C program and run it successfully under C++. Java appears to be similar to C++ when we consider only the “extensions” part of C++. However, some object -oriented features of C++ make the C++ code extremely difficult to follow and maintain.

Listed below are some major C++ features that were intentionally omitted from Java or significantly modified.

1. Java does not support operator overloading.
2. Java does not have template classes as in C++.
3. Java does not support multiple inheritances of classes. This is accomplished using a new feature called “Interface”.
4. Java does not support global variables. Every variable and method is declared within classes and forms part of that class.
5. Java does not use pointers.
6. Java has replaced the destructor function with a finalize() function.
7. There are no header files in Java.

Differences among C, C++ and Java Programming Languages: C vs C++ vs Java

The purpose of learning a programming language is to become a better programmer i.e. to become more effective at designing and implementing new systems and at maintaining old ones.

C, C++, and Java are the most popular programming languages used today at a broad level. They have a pretty similar syntax for basic concepts. Most of the basic constructs like if statements, loops, function syntax, switch case statements and concepts like recursion are still valid. Many other concepts like the syntax for comments, and the idea of static class variables, also held in both Java and C++.

Java uses the syntax of C and structure of C++ language.