Isn't Go designed to fill this niche? It's supposed to be a low-level systems language, but with "friendlier" features than C, and built-in concurrency support.
I don't think it's the best fit, but it's a lot better than many current solutions. I personally prefer Haskell for anything others would write in Go, however many may find Ocaml or Erlang to fit them better.
However I'm biased and believe that functional programming is a better fit, more bug-free, easier, and simpler for most use cases than imperative programming.
Compare http://golang.org/src/pkg/crypto/x509/x509.go to https://www.gitorious.org/gnutls/gnutls/source/6aa26f78150cc...
Other imports/files can be seen at: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/x509-1.4.10/docs/src