I can't code well in C, so I created my simple program in Python can these speeds only be available in C?
Yes.
C and possibly C++ are two of the few that are about as close to hardware as most programmers are able to get. (assembly language is not very cross-platform) Aggressively processing hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, or more of iterations to convert one long bitstream to a smaller bitstream is right at home there.
These things are also tuned every way to Sunday to figure out WHAT they are trying to compress. Is it text, audio (and what format?), video (again what format? mp4, vp6, something decades older. what wrapper? avi, mkv, ogg), microsoft documents, and then there are files that are all of these bundled into a tar (or similar) archive that the user did you the service of not having gzipped the archive to make it harder for you to "squeeze juice" out of? If you are not using metal, or close to metal, something slow like python will suffer no matter how well you tune it.
On the other hand, Python is not that. It is designed for little, short tasks where it doesn't really matter if they are done inefficiently, because they are (relatively) rare. Where with C or C++, finding some little thing on some webpage (oh, and you have to write how to find the thing... 77
and it might miss) to populate a part of a table (oops, the thing is totally too wide for that column because it wasn't the proper hit), all of these difficulties are handled already... with the deal with the devil being speed. For little one-off tasks, speed isn't critical. Millions or trillions of iterations, it will choke.
Then, even if python could "speed itself up" by summoning the functions of the more hardware-centric protocols/methods, it would probably be doing so inefficiently. It would gain on the sub-task, but lose on calling and returning from the sub-task, with maybe a marginal net gain. Then also the "misdiagnosis" where an audio block is requested to be treated as a video block because python misdiagnosed it.
Sorry if this is a bit long-winded. 115