The weave package allows the inclusion of C/C++ within Python code. It is
part of the larger SciPy package, but is made available here as a stand
alone package so that more people can try it out. 

Including C/C++ code within Python offers both another level of optimization
to those who need it, and an easy way to modify and extend an supported
extension libraries such as wxPython and hopefully VTK soon. Inlining C/C++
code within Python generally results in speed ups of 1.5x to 30x speed-up
over algorithms written in pure Python (However, it is also possible to slow
things down...). Generally algorithms that require a large number of calls
to the Python API don't benefit as much from the conversion to C/C++ as
algorithms that have inner loops completely convertable to C.