"I'm often thwarted by the fact that for anything requiring remotely decent speeds, python most of the time already delegates to C extensions and so any rewrite

"I'm often thwarted by the fact that for anything requiring remotely decent speeds, python most of the time already delegates to C extensions and so any rewrite is not as useful" Be sure you verify this is the case for whatever you think it is, though. Pure Python is so much slower than compiled languages (not just Rust) that you don't have to do much percentage-wise in pure Python before you've badly fallen behind in performance versus the pure-compiled alternatives. I think this is asserted a lot more often then it is benchmarked. I am reminded of the way people for a long time asserted that the performance of web languages doesn't matter because you spend all your time waiting for the database, so it never mattered. People would just whip this argument out reflexively. It turns out that if you take a non-trivial codebase written in such a language and actually benchmark it, it is often not true, because as applications grow they tend to rapidly outgrow "all my code is just running a SELECT and slamming the results with minimal processing out to the web stream". I hear this a lot less often than I used to, probably through the slow-but-effective process of a lot of individuals learning the hard way this isn't true. I've seen a lot of Python code. Very little of it that was not "data science" was just a bit of scripting around lots of large C-based objects, such that Python wasn't doing much actual work. And even some of that "data science" was falling back to pure Python without realizing because NumPy actually makes that shockingly easy.