ooc isn't higher or lower-level then C if you don't use the garbage collector. and as I said, I'm not using C++, I'd rather use C. I develop faster in C then in C++, but faster still in ooc. And, you only need mingw or cygwin to use the tutorials on windows.
of course OOC is a higher level, it's OO lol, lack of a garbage collector does not mean low level it just means the language does not support garbage collection. Also you can just disable GC if you hate it so much lol.
But really I don't see why you need to change it so badly, the hard part has already been coded mostly.
Well whichever you do fell about GC you get to pick if you want it. In the end C is low level, C++ is only considered medium level and considering the features of ooc it's a medium level language that translates to a low level one.