Glad you found the one for you. Keep my npub if you want to do more C/C++ things :)

C++ is everything some dream of C with all the modern OOP. Yeah it's a beast, even systems developers admit that. Since C++ is a superset of C you can abuse C++ with C patterns (and many do because when in doubt just access memory directly) C++ adds many complicated features as security mechanisms to leverage the compiler (templates specifically) to help you make better patterns if you want to.

Imo C++ is a complexity short-cut, steeper initial learning curve, but dividends in high level applications compared to writing C. That an C++ has actually package management solutions where C doesn't really.

Finally since C/C++ compilers literally take individual C files, assemble them, and then implement machine code (translational units) called object files, it's a super manual process which is where GNU Make and CMake come in, both of which require their own languages too. Noscrypt (my nostr cryptography library) has like a 600+ line CMake file just to orchestrate the build lmao. So you're not just learning to write code in the language, you're also learning the compiler and build system.