This is true, yes. The kind of performance C delivers is often only achieved by C, Fortran and some other compiler languages. But that's not the point of what I

This is true, yes. The kind of performance C delivers is often only achieved by C, Fortran and some other compiler languages. But that's not the point of what I was saying. I was talking about speeding up the Python language. That's what PyPy is incredibly good at. I once wrote a small traffic simulation in Python. Not real-time. It would take about 15 minutes to run a medium sized simulation using the CPython interpreter. PyPy ran the same simulation in slightly less than a minute. This is a substantial speedup. In this case it was because function calls can be incredibly slow in Python and PyPy takes care of that. I'm not claiming that implementing parts of the program in C is bad (I'm mainly a C programmer anyway). All I say is that it's not really "speeding up Python" when you're not using Python. It's definately an option though and a very good one too! ctypes might not be the best way to do it for some use cases though. In my opinion, the most beautiful way is extending the Python API with native C. That option produces the most LOCs though, and therefore probably more bugs. However, if you've got large portions of a Python program in need of speedup and PyPy won't cut it, it's probably the best option to write a decent part of the low level stuff in C and provide native Python bindings. This way you get the best of both worlds: The performance of C for your underpinnings and the flexibility of Python for developing all the other parts, saving you time and therefore money and sweat.