I very much agree with this. Especially if you use similar C library interfacing styles, you can reuse or abstract out the glue parts easily. About playing on

I very much agree with this. Especially if you use similar C library interfacing styles, you can reuse or abstract out the glue parts easily. About playing on both sides of the efficiency/expressiveness spectrum, the important thing is to be sure to do real benchmarks so you only drop down into C when it pays off. Sometimes, the reasons are not just efficiency -- you may already have C code that does the right thing.