Alternatives to C/C++

Instead of sticking with C/C++ for performance consider:
1.Free Pascal -Small memory use,very fast, easy debug
2.OCaml - medium memory use, fast,very terse, functional and secure.
3.FreeBasic - very fast,easy to use, low memory use, supports QBasic code as dialect. Other Basics to consider: PureBasic/Gambas/PowerBASIC
4.Digital Mars D- fast, easy to write and debug, large library, transition from C/C++ much easier.Garbage collection can be turned off.

FreePascal was recently ported to whole range of mobile devices.
As for speed, naive pascal code is optimized much better than most of "Expert C programmer" code. Plus its catches/prevents errors which would take the sanity of C programmers away(pointer typecasts,function pointers,etc) and the code is very readable(even more than Java).