I love Pascal (C++ less so but we all have our own personal preferences) however if you're targeting the web then you're definitely better off with C#, Java or Go* . You'd get similar language constructs while having a much richer ecosystem to develop in. Which was the point the GP was making with regards to development time verses request throughput. Only with the aforementioned you at least don't sacrifice that much in performance compared with node.
* I know Go gets a lot of hate because of its lack of generics and choice of error handling, but it's worth remembering that for web development you don't run into those particularly annoyances much.
Embedded is one of my interests, so I do keep an eye on news about what is going on.
On my case I would rather try to bend my answer to be either C++ with embedded STL or Pascal, failing that C as well, in spite of my prejudices against it.
Hopefully they would at least allow C99. :)