Sounds like you got exactly what you wanted, faster than python but safer than c/c++. There isn't a free lunch here. Even with eye-watering amounts of engineer

Sounds like you got exactly what you wanted, faster than python but safer than c/c++. There isn't a free lunch here. Even with eye-watering amounts of engineering into optimizer and runtime etc., you aren't going to match c performance in general any more than JVM or .NET has, for much the same reasons. In some languages (Swift is one) you have the option of writing c-like code that performs similarly, but you can't have your cake and eat it, and you shouldn't expect to.