> Well, I’ve been radicalized. I’ve learned enough performance-oriented programming to be dissatisfied with the common functional languages (Haskell, OCaml, Common Lisp/Clojure, Scheme) because each of these languages are predicated on the existence of garbage collection and heaps.

I would take another look at Common Lisp if I were the author. Manual memory management is very much an option where you need it.