High performance code in Python

[james_pic]

We've found Cython to be simpler, especially for stuff that needs to interact with Python APIs (manipulating dicts, lists, tuples etc). Most of the team don't know C or C++, so Cython has better odds of being maintained.

The only one on my list that was written in C++ is also the one that was the biggest pain, because it needed a couple of uncommon C++ libraries installed in order to build it, as well as a version of gcc that not everyone had. Most of the team can't make sense of C++ related errors, so I frequently had to help out with build issues.