No, you can just write D. It'll have the same performance as C, if you write C-like code. It might have better performance than C if you use templates (just like in C++).
But D is not included in the benchmarks game at debian.net, which isn't fair to D either as far as I can tell.
https://dlang.org/spec/interfaceToC.html
Dunno about the Debian benchmarks game or their build environment. I did my own benchmarks and it was quite easy to write working D code compared to C, C++ or Rust. I used LDC, the LLVM D compliler as opposed to DMD. Dub is not that seamless compared to Cargo but given that you have to set things up manually, it doesn't encourage dependency hell.
If you're writing networking code, Go is probably a better choice than vibe.d.