Has anyone ever had code in Python, that turned out not to perform fast enough?
I mean, you were forced to choose another language because of it?
We are investigating using Python for a couple of larger projects, and my feeling is that in most cases, Python is plenty fast enough for most scenarios (compared to say, Java) because it relies on optimized C routines.
I wanted to see if people had instances where they started out in Python, but ended up having to go with something else because of performance.
Thanks.
Yes, twice:

An audio DSP application I wound up completely rewriting in C++ because I couldn't get appropriate performance in Python; I don't consider the Python implementation wasted because it let me prototype the concept very easily, and the C++ port went smoothly because I had a working reference implementaton.
A procedural graphic rendering project, where generating large 2D texture maps in Python was taking a long time; I wrote a C++ DLL and used ctypes/windll to use it from Python.
Python Performance - have you ever had to rewrite in something else?