Interesting, 37signals released their own Golang based version of statsd: https://github.com/noahhl/go-batsd Probably for the same reasons you rewrote it in pure C.
[1] https://github.com/etsy/statsd/blob/master/lib/set.js [2] https://github.com/armon/statsite/blob/master/src/set.c [3] http://research.google.com/pubs/pub40671.html