If you are more of a programmer, you would not be satisfied with Shiva, I guess.
The scripting language is pretty high level, so you are somewhat limited. It is not possible to define own data structures, as an example.

I don't know how the speed of lite-C compares to C++, but the compiled code of Unity is "around 50% slower than native C++ code". (source) I am just mentioning this, because I thought "nearly as fast as C++" was to be taken literally in the first place.