Given the original presenter is one of the major contributors to PyPy, I'm fairly certain that wouldn't be his first advice: I'd expect it'd be to try PyPy (and

Given the original presenter is one of the major contributors to PyPy, I'm fairly certain that wouldn't be his first advice: I'd expect it'd be to try PyPy (and file a bug if it's slower than CPython!). Also note on the last slide: "Stop writing C extensions, use something like cffi". There's two (really) good reasons you should do this: firstly, your code is no longer tied tied to CPython, so using alternative Python implementations (like PyPy) becomes viable; secondly, you don't have to use C — you can trivially use anything that exports functions using the C ABI.