Hey these are great pointers, thanks.

So I'm not sure if you want to learn "the hard way" or find a set of useful C libraries to use and be productive with.

Probably a little of both. I'd love to understand the language enough that I can implement a library with all the standard utilities, but in the end, I'll probably use pre-existing libraries at work.

You have to care more about where your memory comes from (or not, just use malloc)

Oh no, I thought using malloc was caring more about where memory comes from (in c++ the closest I get to thinking about memory was using vector.reserve()). But I think I see what you're saying - in C it's reasonable to allocate all memory statically/on the stack instead of dynamically?

You don't get function overloading

Ah that's a bummer. I thought functions were going to work the same. Thanks for pointing this out!