There are few applications that require 100% of the code to be high performance. Most performance problems are of the "bottleneck" kind, so writing your entire

There are few applications that require 100% of the code to be high performance. Most performance problems are of the "bottleneck" kind, so writing your entire app in a language like Python for that ease of development is smart. It gives you options to optimize that 1-2% of your code that is critical without incurring a development penalty on the other 98-99%. GVR's tips can be seen as an escalation path for optimizing. Don't jump into C before you've actually optimized your Python, because you might not need to. In 10 years of writing Python, I've yet to hit a point where I've needed to do that. I'm kind of looking forward to it, actually.