I hate responding with such a flip answer, but have you tried Cython? If you have to do some serious munging inside inner loops and need something that is a bi

I hate responding with such a flip answer, but have you tried Cython? If you have to do some serious munging inside inner loops and need something that is a bit more aware of data structures and the shape of your data I have found Cython to be a nice option for building the equivalent of a Python C-extension module with mostly Python-like code and structure.