Is there a reason it couldn't be done with C++11/14 with an extern interface to C?

Here is a lib to match python's string functions in C++.

https://code.google.com/p/pystring/

When working with string and vectors C++11 can actually be pretty straight forward, productive, and clear with no manual memory management. It definitely doesn't have as many string functions out of the box as modern scripting languages though.