I have actually tried that and you're right. The whole experience made me consider going back to electrical engineering when I realised that the status quo hadn't improved in 20 years :)
Have you looked at Lua+C and LuaJIT+nginx (CloudFlare, OpenResty)? Work is underway to compile a subset of Perl6 to LuaJIT+nginx.
I can't get over the 1 based indexes in Lua, unless that has changed in recent years.
Still there :) The trade-off is rapid development (interpreted, GC), fast execution (JIT faster than Javascript) and easy interfacing to C libraries.
I shall have a try next week and see if I can cope with it :)