This is a list of differences between Java and C, and assumes that the reader knows less about the latter. It's worth familiarising yourself with all the points, even if you don't fully understand them, then you may be aware of the cause of any problem you might encounter.

Many features of C, particularly its standard library facilities, are not dealt with in any great depth, since you can look those up in help files or manual pages, or a good reference book.

• Portability
• Ease of development
• Speed
• Primitive types
• Comments
• Limited encapsulation
  • Structures instead of classes
  • Single namespace for functions and global variables
  • Lack of function name overloading
• Enumerations
• Unions
• Type aliasing
• Declarations and definitions
  • Functions and their prototypes
  • Global objects
  • Local objects
  • Scope
• Empty parameter lists
• Program modularity
• Preprocessing
  • File inclusion
  • Macros
  • Conditional compilation
• Pointers instead of references
  • Pointer types
  • Null and undefined pointers
  • Dangling pointers
  • Passing arguments by reference
  • Pointers to structures and unions
  • Pointers to functions
  • Pointers to pointers
  • Generic pointers
• Arrays and pointer arithmetic
  • Initialising arrays
  • Array-pointer relationship
  • Passing arrays to functions
  • Array length
  • Arrays as function parameters
• const instead of final
  • Pointers to const objects
  • const pointers
• Inline functions
• Characters and strings
  • Wide characters
• Dynamic memory management
• Lack of exceptions
• main() function
• Standard library facilities