[mjevans]

golang is a great middle ground; it defaults to safe (but might be slow if you do something the wrong way), it can be fast if you avoid costly mistakes (the syntax tends to help you remember what you're actually working with as a data structure so costs are mostly upfront), and if you /need/ to get fancy and know exactly what you're doing you can use the unsafe library to work with pointers (or interface with other libraries; if you're not sure if they're safe to execute concurrently (most state based systems aren't) there's runtime.LockOSThread() to pin that thread's actions).