Which is why Nim would be a good candidate. Compiles to C so has the benefits of its portability, interoperability and speed.
You have a hell of a lot of control over its performance and behaviour. Are there instances where you found that wasn't the case?
As far as the understanding of C goes, I can agree with that. But we are discussing rewriting sqlite in something else after all.
Seeing as Go was suggested above (which is also garbage collected), I figured I would mention Nim too.
Love to hear what those are and what language you would consider developing SQLite in.
But, I tried working in Nim without GC and out turned out to be a bigger hassle than I expected it to be. GC was supposed to be ref counted and now they're doing memory regions? There is also a -gc:stack which I'm not sure if it works the way like in C++. Then there is the pointer free paradigm. Don't get me wrong, I'm very optimistic about Nim and would be great if it really replaces C. But I feel like it's doing too many things at once.
I personally feel like Nim dev team should stop adding new features every release and work on releasing a solid 1.0.