Java has a very rich set of libraries, running the gamut from basic data types like maps and regular expressions, through UI toolkits, and on to enterprise-architecture frameworks.

The C language has been a programming staple for decades. Here’s how it stacks up against C++, Java, C#, Go, Rust, Python, and the newest kid on the block—Carbon.

C++’s thread safe smart pointers are three times slower than Java references. And Java has HotSpot Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which features just-in-time (JIT) compilation for better performance.

Its top 10 were JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP, C#, CSS, C++, TypeScript, Ruby, C, and Swift. Rust was in 19th spot. Notably, though, Java was not one of the languages to see much growth on GitHub.

Java is influenced by C and C++, so it has many similarities with those languages (and C#). One of the big advantages of Java is that it is “platform independent.” ...