I would go with lua for the players. You can easily sandbox it, by not compiling in the dangerous functions. Using debug.sethook you can limit execution by coun

I would go with lua for the players. You can easily sandbox it, by not compiling in the dangerous functions. Using debug.sethook you can limit execution by count (https://www.lua.org/pil/23.2.html https://www.lua.org/pil/23.2.html). And finally you can bring your own alloc for lua. There are also decades of articles on how lua works with C and C++, and you can find examples for Rust and others too.