Comment by noam_k

You may want to look at Lua[0]. It's often used as an embedded scripting language in larger projects (and games), has good performance, is memory safe, and is extensible in the same manner as Python (write your performance bottleneck in C/C++).

I don't remember specifics, but there are some odd footguns to look out for.

[0] https://www.lua.org/