Are there any languages besides C that might give the performance improvement that Limbic~Region is looking for here?
Perhaps Fortran (I've never used it personally)? A quick Googlesearch revealed this link, the abstract of which indicates that Java could potentially be only 30% slower than Fortran or C for some types of numerical calculations.

It just seems strange to me that C seems to have been the default science/math language for so long. People are spitting out dynamically typed languages seemingly left and right (JavaScript, VBScript, Python, Perl). I've never written a programming language, but for a group of folks with the right background would creating an alternative to C require much greater effort than that which has been put into the development of Perl?