Contrary to what the python, ruby, perl people want you to believe, it doesn't take that much time to code the same thing in C, especially if you are looking for performance. Their languages are fine for speed of shitty little shell scripts and maybe the incredibly I/O laden BitTorrent.
That said people who claim it takes longer to code it in C are ignoring the fact that they don't know C well enough to confidently code it in C.
OCaml is a good functional contender against C, although if you code in a functional style it usually won't be as fast as the imperative styles.