If you like this kind of dynamic code generation and usage, LLVM with ctypes is also a promising avenue, as you don't (necessarily) have to invoke an external c

If you like this kind of dynamic code generation and usage, LLVM with ctypes is also a promising avenue, as you don't (necessarily) have to invoke an external compiler. You can build the module on-the-fly. For example see bitey, an abstraction to directly import LLVM bitcode files: https://github.com/dabeaz/bitey https://github.com/dabeaz/bitey That said, there's so many ways to speed up Python these days... In most practical cases where I need performance I'd try to run it in PyPy (easiest), use Cython (great python-C hybrid), use Theano (to generate GPU code), or even write a plain Python C API extension (no dependencies to deploy, and in contrary to ctypes you can directly offer Python classes without Python wrapper).