Have you looked at cython? Might have been a great compromise. I saw similar gains in my code eventually, but the process to get there was very smooth. At firs

Have you looked at cython? Might have been a great compromise. I saw similar gains in my code eventually, but the process to get there was very smooth. At first I could just use original python code and covert it piece by piece (of course sometimes you need to refactor). You can drop GIL too.