You mental? Homesteading is not plausible for most since it requires a whole lot of money to buy an acceptable property in reach of their job. In particular Europeans. Also funding a business is a risky endeavor.

Yes. Unless you have a really good reasons there are safe and portable versions you should use instead.

If you tell the Compiler to be careful and avoid writing c code c++ does not segfault. This is a user error.

You can technically even write Assembler code and compile with gpp.