Once you've used C enough, you get the skill to avoid writing segfaults, and when a segfault happens, they're a lot easier to debug.
However, since you're just interested in writing a fast command-line app, what about the JVM or .NET? Those have a startup time issue, but once they're running they're very fast, less than an order of magnitude slower than C/Rust/Zig/etc.
However, since you're just interested in writing a fast command-line app, what about the JVM or .NET? Those have a startup time issue, but once they're running they're very fast, less than an order of magnitude slower than C/Rust/Zig/etc.