Can I use the Java implementations in another language without significant headache?
It's actually quite easy to create a C bindings for a Go library, using CGo and -buildmode=c-shared.
I'm not sure what effect the Go runtime has on the overall application, but it doesn't seem like it would be "less possible" than with Java.
https://www.graalvm.org/latest/reference-manual/native-image...
Then again, many times OS IPC is a much better option.