In java any kind of minimal assignment can explode behind the scenes into a a whole pile of function calls, that would never happen in C, what you see is what you get.
It's interesting to compare the real difference here. In C, what you see at compile-time is what you get. As compared to an interpreted language where what you see at compile-time is probably going to be completely different from what happens at runtime. The difference is really where the optimizations occur. Runtime optimizations have certainly come a long way.
