This is why I still use Python in performance critical code (but not so performance critical that you need to squeeze each CPU cycle). It's simply too easy to w

This is why I still use Python in performance critical code (but not so performance critical that you need to squeeze each CPU cycle). It's simply too easy to write performance critical functions in C and ffi call it in python. Of course, compared to many other language it's still slow "in general" but for your give particular task it's pretty easy to make it very fast. Just write the bottlenecking tight loop in C and everything else can be in python.