What are the differences between C C and C in terms of real-world applications

Question

As I posted earlier here I ve decided to try my hand at one of these  but given my interests as a web developer  I d like to know the difference between them in their real-world applications  Edit Note  While I m a web developer  please don t let that limit your answer  I m 30   I ve got years of career changing ahead of me

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For raw speed  use C   For power  use C     For  NET compatibility  use C   They re all pretty complex as languages go  C through decades of gradual accretion  C   through years of more rapid enhancement  and C  through the power of Microsoft

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C is the bare-bones  simple  clean language that makes you do everything yourself   It doesn t hold your hand  it doesn t stop you from shooting yourself in the foot   But it has everything you need to do what you want     C   is C with classes added  and then a whole bunch of other things  and then some more stuff   It doesn t hold your hand  but it ll let you hold your own hand  with add-on GC  or RAII and smart-pointers   If there s something you want to accomplish  chances are there s a way to abuse the template system to give you a relatively easy syntax for it   moreso with C  0x    This complexity also gives you the power to accidentally create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot   C  is Microsoft s stab at improving on C   and Java   Tons of syntactical features  but no where near the complexity of C     It runs in a full managed environment  so memory management is done for you   It does let you  get dirty  and use unsafe code if you need to  but it s not the default  and you have to do some work to shoot yourself

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From your other posts  I guess you want to learn a new language to get new skills  My advice is that the language is not really important  what is important is the quality of its community  advice  but also existing code you can read and learn from  and the available libraries frameworks  In this respect  I think the  quot C family quot  is not the best choice for you  web libraries and frameworks are few  not portable and not great  and coding style of code you can study varies a lot and may confuse you a lot  although C is my favorite language   I would advise to just learn C  and try to really understand the concept of pointers  then move to other languages more adapted to the web  Python or JavaScript comes to mind - or even Java   Also  in the C family  Objective-C has the best mix of power and simplicity in my opinion  but is a niche player

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Bear in mind that I speak ASFAC  B     I ve put the most important differentiating factor first   Garbage Collection  Garbage Collection  GC  is the single most important factor in differentiating between these languages   While C and C   can be used with GC  it is a bolted-on afterthought and cannot be made to work as well  the best known is here  - it has to be  conservative  which means that it cannot collect all unused memory   C  is designed from the ground up to work on a GC platform  with standard libraries also designed that way  It makes an absolutely fundamental difference to developer productivity that has to be experienced to be believed   There is a belief widespread among C C   users that GC equates with  bad performance   But this is out-of-date folklore  even the Boehm collector on C C   performs much better than most people expect it to   The typical fear is of  long pauses  where the program stops so the GC can do some work  But in reality these long pauses happen with non-GC programs  because they run on top of a virtual memory system  which occasionally interrupts to move data between physical memory and disk   There is also widespread belief that GC can be replaced with shared ptr  but it can t  the irony is that in a multi-threaded program  shared ptr is slower than a GC-based system   There are environments that are so frugal that GC isn t practical - but these are increasingly rare  Cell phones typically have GC  The CLR s GC that C  typically runs on appears to be state-of-the-art   Since adopting C  about 18 months ago I ve gone through several phases of pure performance tuning with a profiler  and the GC is so efficient that it is practically invisible during the operation of the program   GC is not a panacea  it doesn t solve all programming problems  it only really cleans up memory allocation  if you re allocating very large memory blocks then you will still need to take some care  and it is still possible to have what amounts to a memory leak in a sufficiently complex program - and yet  the effect of GC on productivity makes it a pretty close approximation to a panacea   Undefined Behaviour  C   is founded on the notion of undefined behaviour  That is  the language specification defines the outcome of certain narrowly defined usages of language features  and describes all other usages as causing undefined behaviour  meaning in principle that the operation could have any outcome at all  in practice this means hard-to-diagnose bugs involving apparently non-deterministic corruption of data    Almost everything about C   touches on undefined behaviour  Even very nice forthcoming features like lambda expressions can easily be used as convenient way to corrupt the stack  capture a local by reference  allow the lambda instance to outlive the local    C  is founded on the principle that all possible operations should have defined behaviour  The worst that can happen is an exception is thrown  This completely changes the experience of software construction    There s unsafe mode  which has pointers and therefore undefined behaviour  but that is strongly discouraged for general use - think of it as analogous to embedded assembly language    Complexity  In terms of complexity  C   has to be singled out  especially if we consider the very-soon-to-be standardized new version  C   does absolutely everything it can to make itself effective  short of assuming GC  and as a result it has an awesome learning curve  The language designers excuse much of this by saying  Those features are only for library authors  not ordinary users  - but to be truly effective in any language  you need to build your code as reusable libraries  So you can t escape   On the positive side  C   is so complex  it s like a playground for nerds  I can assure you that you would have a lot of fun learning how it all fits together  But I can t seriously recommend it as a basis for productive new work  oh  the wasted years     on mainstream platforms   C keeps the language simple  simple in the sense of  the compiler is easy to write    but this makes the coding techniques more arcane   Note that not all new language features equate with added complexity  Some language features are described as  syntactic sugar   because they are shorthand that the compiler expands for you  This is a good way to think of a great deal of the enhancements to C  over recent years  The language standard even specifies some features by giving the translation to longhand  e g  using statement expands into try finally    At one point  it was possible to think of C   templates in the same way  But they ve since become so powerful that they are now form the basis of a whole separate dimension of the language  with its own enthusiastic user communities and idioms   Libraries  The strangest thing about C and C   is that they don t have a standard interchangeable form of pre-compiled library  Integrating someone else s code into your project is always a little fiddly  with obscure decisions to be made about how you ll be linking to it   Also  the standard library is extremely basic - C   has a complete set of data structures and a way of representing strings  std  string   but that s still minimal  Is there a standard way of finding a list of files in a directory  Amazingly  no  Is there standard library support for parsing or generating XML  No  What about accessing databases  Be serious  Writing a web site back-end  Are you crazy  etc   So you have to go hunting further afield  For XML  try Xerces  But does it use std  string to represent strings  Of course not   And do all these third-party libraries have their own bizarre customs for naming classes and functions  You betcha   The situation in C  couldn t be more different  the fundamentals were in place from the start  so everything inter-operates beautifully  and because the fundamentals are supplied by the CLR  there is cross-language support    It s not all perfect  generics should have been in place from the start but wasn t  which does leave a visible scar on some older libraries  but it is usually trivial to fix this externally  Also a number of popular libraries are ported from Java  which isn t as good a fit as it first appears   Closures  Anonymous Methods with Local Variable Capture   Java and C are practically the last remaining mainstream languages to lack closures  and libraries can be designed and used much more neatly with them than without  this is one reason why ported Java libraries sometimes seem clunky to a C   user    The amusing thing about C   is that its standard library was designed as if closures were available in the language  container types   lt algorithm gt    lt functional gt    Then ten years went by  and now they re finally being added  They will have a huge impact  although  as noted above  they leak underfined behaviour    C  and JavaScript are the most widely used languages in which closures are  idiomatically established    The major difference between those languages being that C  is statically typed while JavaScript is dynamically typed    Platform Support  I ve put this last only because it doesn t appear to differentiate these languages as much as you might think  All these languages can run on multiple OSes and machine architectures  C is the most widely-supported  then C    and finally C   although C  can be used on most major platforms thanks to an open source implementation called Mono    My experience of porting C   programs between Windows and various Unix flavours was unpleasant  I ve never tried porting anything very complex in C  to Mono  so I can t comment on that

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C - an older programming language that is described as Hands-on  As the programmer you must tell the program to do everything  Also this language will let you do almost anything  It does not support object orriented code  Thus no classes    C   - an extention language per se of C  In C code    means increment 1  Thus C   is better than C  It allows for highly controlled object orriented code  Once again a very hands on language that goes into MUCH detail    C  - Full object orriented code resembling the style of C C   code  This is really closer to JAVA  C  is the latest version of the C style languages and is very good for developing web applications

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Both C and C   give you a lower level of abstraction that  with increased complexity  provides a breadth of access to underlying machine functionality that are not necessarily exposed with other languages  Compared to C  C   adds the convenience of a fully object oriented language reduced development time  which can  potentially  add an additional performance cost   In terms of real world applications  I see these languages applied in the following domains   C   Kernel level software  Hardware device drivers Applications where access to old  stable code is required    C C     Application or Server development where memory management needs to be fine tuned  and can t be left to generic garbage collection solutions   Development environments that require access to libraries that do not interface well with more modern managed languages  Although managed C   can be used to access the  NET framework  it is not a seamless transition    C  provides a managed memory model that adds a higher level of abstraction again   This level of abstraction adds convenience and improves development times  but complicates access to lower level APIs and makes specialized performance requirements problematic    It is certainly possible to implement extremely high performance software in a managed memory environment  but awareness of the implications is essential     The syntax of C  is certainly less demanding  and error prone  than C C   and has  for the initiated programmer  a shallower learning curve   C    Rapid client application development  High performance Server development  StackOverflow for example  that benefits from the  NET framework  Applications that require the benefits of the  NET framework in the language it was designed for    Johannes R  ssel makes the valid point that the use C  Pointers  Unsafe and Unchecked keywords break through the layer of abstraction upon which C  is built  I would emphasize that type of programming is the exception to most C  development scenarios and not a fundamental part of the language  as is the case with C C

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My opinion is C  and ASP NET would be the best of the three for development that is web biased    I doubt anyone writes new web apps in C or C   anymore  It was done 10 years ago  and there s likely a lot of legacy code still in use  but they re not particularly well suited  there doesn t appear to be as much  ongoing  tool support  and they probably have a small active community that does web development  except perhaps for web server development   I wrote many website C   COM objects back in the day  but C  is far more productive that there s no compelling reason to code C or C    in this context  unless you need to    I do still write C   if necessary  but it s typically for a small problem domain  e g  communicating from C  via P Invoke to old C-style dll s - doing some things that are downright clumsy in C  were a breeze to create a C   COM object as a bridge   The nice thing with C  is that you can also easily transfer into writing Windows and Console apps and stay in C   With Mono you re also not limited to Windows  although you may be limited to which libraries you use    Anyways this is all from a web-biased perspective  If you asked about embedded devices I d say C or C    You could argue none of these are suited for web development  but C  ASP NET is pretty slick  it works well  there are heaps of online resources  a huge community  and free dev tools   So from a real-world perspective  picking only one of C   C   and C as requested  as a general rule  you re better to stick with C

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C is the core language that most closely resembles and directly translates into CPU machine code   CPUs follow instructions that move  add  logically combine  compare  jump  push and pop   C does exactly this using much easier syntax   If you study the disassembly  you can learn to write C code that is just as fast and compact as assembly   It is my preferred language on 8 bit micro controllers with limited memory   If you write a large PC program in C you will get into trouble because of its limited organization   That is where object oriented programming becomes powerful   The ability of C   and C  classes to contain data and functions together enforces organization which in turn allows more complex operability over C   C   was essential for quick processing in the past when CPUs only had one core   I am beginning to learn C  now   Its class only structure appears to enforce a higher degree of organization than C   which should ultimately lead to faster development and promote code sharing   C  is not interpreted like VB   It is partially compiled at development time and then further translated at run time to become more platform friendly

[c#] What are the differences between C, C# and C++ in terms of real-world applications?

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