It's pretty dang easy to do that today with LuaJIT/C, and you don't get any of the other baggage (weird syntax, sub-standard string handling, lack of libs, etc.).

I'm literally building something that is right in Erlang's wheelhouse—exactly what is is designed for, and I'm not using it, despite knowing that, because it's easier for me to get exactly what I want in LuaJIT/C today.

I get garbage collection when I want it. I get arena allocation when I want it, too.

I get custom JIT-compiled functions when I want them (DynASM), but I also get JIT-compiled methods in Lua when performance matters less.

I can talk directly to my network hardware with a driver written in Lua. That's likely possible in Erlang, but I have no idea how and no time to learn, either.

I also know how to solve anything I'm likely to encounter in C. With Erlang, I'd have to learn a new way to solve it. Who knows how long that would take to do well?

I really do like Erlang at the conceptual level, but not enough to endure all of the other things I don't like about it. I'm also far less concerned about C than I was 10 years ago. The tooling around C these days is really quite incredible for people who want to do safety-critical systems, or high-availability systems, or whatever. You can get as much assurance about your code as you want with a reasonable amount of effort.