[rerere]

I'm going to get downvoted for saying this, but you guy are really wasting your time. Python was never intended to be fast; even Guido considers it "fast enough," which is a polite way of saying it's going to stay slow. Yeah, you could use weird hacks or write half your program in C, but why?

There are a ton of good languages out there that can give good performance on these kind of problems AND don't have the problems of C++. I mean you've got Golang, Scala, or Erlang for starters. Just sayin'.