It seems you're looking for a language/runtime that's 'extremely popular' and has very useful runtime features like 'speed, concurrency & parallelism'?
This constrains the space quite a bit. Languages significantly less popular than Python are excluded by definition [1]; languages subscribing to very opinionated design decisions or too low-level (like C) are also excluded by definition.
This only leaves Java, C++, Python itself, and Javascript. If you run Python on a JIT runtime like PyPy [2], you'll probably achieve significant speedup.
Erlang, Elixir, Scala, Clojure, languages that also have good approaches towards concurrency are not very popular in the greater scheme of things.
[1] the TIOBE index is an imperfect measure of popularity, but let's use it here -- http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index