Is C Better At Dynamic Loading Than Java?

Mike McTernan asks: "I am about to start programming my final year project for my degree. I am aiming to write a lightweight application that will communicate with the user through some (yet to be dreamt up) novel speech interface. The program is to support the idea of applets that can be loaded and unloaded on demand, and should be reasonably lightweight. The target OS will be Linux on an ARM based board. My initial considerations were to use Java, since Reflection allows easy opening of new class files at runtime, but Blackdown are only upto 1.1.8 on arm, and this doesn't allow WeakReferences that I would very much need to use for the unloading aspect. I thought about using gcj but this isn't upto Java 2 either. I then though about C, and it seems tempting and would give a much finer grained control over the application. In particular I think can do anything with dlopen() that reflection can do for me in Java."

"Am I correct in thinking that C is probably more protable than Java since I can get it to compile on any Linux system, most Unix variants (with tweaks) and probably on Windows with some hacks ;) I can only run Java on a few supported platforms (downloads for Java seem only to be Solaris SPARC|x86, Linux x86 & Windows). So, in summary, should I bother with using an outdated JDK on arm and limit my self to a select range of platforms, or just dig in and enjoy the freedom of C?"