Coming from a Linux/OSX world I had to port a library to Windows the other day. That used to be an utter nightmare with C or pre-C++11 codebases. I actually found it pretty painless. The only things I found annoying were the various syscalls and interacting with the crypto libraries (and you thought openssl was ugly...).
Modern C++ is pretty darn nice to work with. It's not a "safe" language by any means, but with good tooling, design, and a good static analyzer you can prevent the vast majority of memory bugs you'd run into with C. Plus the compilers are so mature you get great performance right out of the box.