My comment wasn't about fast "scripting" languages, for whatever your definition of that is. I don't think stronger typing and memory constraint enforcement have anything to do with scripting languages. In my opinion, C lack them by design, not be necessity. A language could, in theory enforce them without runtime penalty and without losing too much flexibility (such as array aliasing).

C++11/14 "auto" is an example where someone can have the equivalent of a void* with compile time type checking and "no" runtime penalty. Yes, multiple specialized version of the method will be created and increase the binary size and potential cache fault, but much of them will (ok, should...) be eliminated/combined again during LTO. A slightly incompatible fork of C could also remove array to pointer demotion, sizeof() would then be consistent and potential overflow would be possible to catch using branch analysis or -fsanitize=.