We do this in robotics (research) all the time, eg. for image and pointcloud processing. I've implemented algorithms in plain python, numpy, and then OpenCV / P

We do this in robotics (research) all the time, eg. for image and pointcloud processing. I've implemented algorithms in plain python, numpy, and then OpenCV / PCL. When a compute-intensive task starts becoming painful, it's profiled, improved, and/or eventually forked into a C project with python-friendly wrappers. I acknowledge this is very anecdotal... but my (previous) labs observed a tradeoff in developer productivity in Python vs C, and deemed Python worthwhile (avoiding classic premature optimization and whatnot).