[pbecotte]

I've certainly never been bottlenecked on date parsing :) However, many/most of the high performance python libraries are built in C code, and compiled down into something the python interpreter can use directly. There are lots of python bindings written in c++ to native c libraries as well, I know I have used ZeroMQ pretty recently. Rust is done the same way- the code is compiled down into objects that Python can use directly- its not like running a javascript interpreter in your code.