[bainsfather]

I do not think that is correct. With chess, you face exponential branching that quickly overwhelms your language-dependent speedup.

Is your python code e.g. 10x times slower than C code? With a branching factor of e.g. 10, that would mean you only search to depth 9 ply whilst C would search to 10 ply [a]. You are not losing that much! A ballpark ELO grade would not vary qualitatively between python and C.

[a] With alpha-beta search, maybe it is 8 ply vs 10 ply. Also the branching factor is larger than 10. But the point remains valid.