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 hold in both Java and C++.
Java uses the syntax of C and structure of C++ language.


This article summarizes the main differences among most popular programming languages C, C++ and Java..

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Introduction to C, C++ and Java :

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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.


[Read] Comparitive Study of Hello World Program in C , C++ and Java

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Differences among C, C++, Java :

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The main difference between c++ and java is that C++ does not support database connection while Java supports database connection.The other differences can be summarized as : 

Aspects	C	C++	Java
Developed Year	1972	1979	1991
Developed By	Dennis Ritchie	Bjarne Stroustrup	James Gosling
Successor of	BCPL	C	C(Syntax) & C++ (Structure)
Paradigms	Procedural	Object Oriented	Object Oriented
Platform Dependency	Dependent	Dependent	Independent
Keywords	32	63	50 defined (goto, const unusable)
Datatypes : union, structure	Supported	Supported	Not Supported
Pre-processor directives	Supported (#include, #define)	Supported (#include, #define)	Not Supported
Header files	Supported	Supported	Use Packages (import)
Inheritance	No Inheritance	Supported	Multiple Inheritance not Supported
Overloading	No Overloading	Supported	Operator Overloading not Supported
Pointers	Supported	Supported	No Pointers
Code Translation	Compiled	Compiled	Interpreted
Storage Allocation	Uses malloc, calloc	Uses new , delete	uses garbage collector
Multi-threading and Interfaces	Not Supported	Not Supported	Supported
Exception Handling	No Exception handling	Supported	Supported
Templates	Not Supported	Supported	Not Supported
Storage class: auto, extern	Supported	Supported	Not Supported
Destructors	No Constructor or Destructor	Supported	Not Supported
Database Connectivity	Not Supported	Not Supported	Supported

Java is an Interpreted language while C, C++ are compiled languages.We all know what a compiler does. It takes your code & translates it into the machine-level code. The code is ‘compiled’. While with Java, the code is first transformed into the bytecode and then this bytecode is executed by the JVM.

Also, C uses the top-down approach while C++ , Java uses the bottom-up approach.In C, formulating the program begins by defining the whole and then splitting them into smaller elements. JAVA,C++ follows the bottom-up approach where the smaller elements combine together to form the whole.

I tried to sum up mostly differences among these popular languages with this comparison table. Hope, this will be helpful to you.

Have Fun!