I hate to say it, but this probably would not have happened in a garbage collected language.

GC languages are fast these days. If you don't want a runtime like C# (which has excellent performance) a language like Go would have worked just fine here, compiling to a small native binary but with a GC.

I don't really understand the aversion to GC's. In memory constrained scenarios or where performance is an absolute top priority, I understand wanting manual control. But that seems like a very rare scenario in user space.