I've found dropping down to C to be a pain to set up the first time in any language (Ruby, Tcl, etc...) but once you have the tooling, it's just another workflow. When you think about it, even JavaScript takes a lot of setting up these days (preprocessors, linters, endless debates about why coffeescript is still a good language (hint: it's the existential operator)). But, you amortize the cost of this setup over the lifetime of the project so they are actually quite small.

But, it does seem that there are not regular blog posts about how to drop into C to make even the worst scripting language performant. Seems like maybe it's a dying art???