[nurbl]

It's easy to drop in Cython in an existing project where you need some performance, and start gradually "cythonizing" modules from the inside out. The rest of the code does not need to care.

With a bit of care (and benchmarking) you can get very respectable speed. The main drawback is that the further you go, the more C knowledge you need in order to not blast your own feet off.

If you're just after a bit more performance in general, a drop in solution like pypy might be enough.