[mdup]

Not advocating anything, but could C++ have been a good choice? You'd get top performance, small memory footprint, opt-in static linking, at the price of a less "fun" language and verbosity. Regarding memory leaks, it's easy to write a leak-free C++ program these days with smart pointers. However, it doesn't come "batteries included" for net-related stuff, and ASIO can give a couple of headaches.

[windlep]

It could've been. Though now that so much of heka is involved in moving data between the Lua layer, turning it into plain C is a better option. trink, one of the heka authors has a project called hindsight that does just that.