I have been using pythran for the last year and the nice thing is that you hardly have to rewrite anything but get speeds which are often as fast (or sometimes

I have been using pythran for the last year and the nice thing is that you hardly have to rewrite anything but get speeds which are often as fast (or sometimes faster) than c modules. The problem with cython is that to really get the performance benefits your code looks almost like C. I agree with you on the optimize the bits that matter, often the performance critical parts are very small fractions of the overall code base.