Rust might also work. Would harden the distro and also help you get that bootup time down.
Discussion
Curious if you mean still on Pi, or are you talking about adding support for another hardware platform?
Just spitballing. Domain expertise limited. Hard not to believe Python is a dog on these little embedded platforms.
Go is just as fast and safe but a pleasure to develop. Concurrency is built in so you you can avoid polling for events. It wins over Rust by Lindy effect. Compared to C++, go’s compilation time is wicked fast. In C++ everything is complicated and takes forever to recompile.