As I said, I find that 90% of the time Perl's performance is adequate for my needs, or (more importantly) those of my employers. In the odd 10% of the time that Perl wouldn't give the required performance, I doubt if any of its direct competitors could, either. Perl may have adequate performance for your needs; you would probably, as said by oshalla need to use Inline::C to handle the low-level interactions. I'd suggest trying it; the initial price is cheap, and I think Perl's documentation is good, although the documentation of CPAN modules varies from non-existent to quite good.

As for the grammar and spelling issues, my younger daughter (now a college freshman) had 10 years of speech therapy and is LD; she's the one who has labeled me a grammar nazi.