Introduction

This is a comparison of the C# programming language with the Java programming language. While the focus of this article is mainly the programming languages and their features, such a comparison will necessarily also consider some platform features and some library features. Neither Java nor C# can be evaluated without taking the respective platforms and libraries into consideration.

The comparison will naturally focus on the areas where the languages differ. This may skew the fact that the two languages and their platforms are actually more alike than they are different: Both are (primarily) statically, strongly and explicitly typed, both are class-based object-oriented, both are designed with semi-interpretation or runtime compilation in mind, both use garbage-collected memory models and both are considered "curly brace" C/C++ style languages. The common ancestry is also evident in the fact that common concepts are often termed the same way and more often than not have very similar syntax.