C or C# or C++

Andrew,

If you're relatively new to programming, I would recommend that you focus on learning C# instead of C++. C# runs on a managed runtime which makes things like memory management simpler for developers. As others have stated on this thread, you can run C# cross-platform using Mono or with .NET Core.

Microsoft currently doesn't have a solution (to my knowledge) for creating cross-platform desktop applications. For a Windows only solution, I would recommend that you look at WPF (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/wpf/getting-started/introduction-to-wpf-in-vs).

Microsoft's Xamarin platform allows you to create cross-platform (Windows Phone, iOS, and Android) mobile applications using C#. See https://www.xamarin.com/ for more information. We also have a course on Xamarin that'll be released in the near future, so keep an eye out for that too.

To make requests against a REST/HTTP API using C#, I'd recommend that you take a look at the HttpClient class:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.net.http.httpclient?view=netframework-4.7

Here's a walkthrough for building a simple REST client that uses the HttpClient class to make requests against an API:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/tutorials/console-webapiclient

I hope this helps!

Thanks ~James

stdio.h is the header file in the C standard library. It is used for input/output

iostream is the input output class in C++. For C# https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io(v=vs.110).aspx

One good example for using C++ is GPU programming and dealing with Graphical Libraries like Open GL on a Linux Machine. That would be an overhead if we used managed code like Java or C# because every Microcode instruction count I second Andrew's request