[tynes]

The JS implemention is a fork of bcoin, the JS Bitcoin full node and production backend.

It binds to libunbound but you are right that you would want a lower level language for it to be more scalable. There is a rust implemention work in progress here: https://github.com/UrkelLabs/rsd

There is also a C light client here: https://github.com/handshake-org/hnsd

For the consensus, there are C bindings for the cryptography and a workerpool that really speeds things up.

It could also be possible to dump the Handshake zone into a zone file and serve from behind unbound.