&gt; <i>when manipulating real binary or in memory data, a little bit of C would really simplify</i><p>In what sense? Accessing an octet in a buffer and performing basic bitwise operations on it is equivalent:<p><pre><code>   # C _and_ Python
   some_buffer[idx] &amp; 0x80
</code></pre>
Reading a buffer in Python is slightly <i>less</i> error-prone, as errors are automatically converted to exceptions, which can be caught at a more centralized location in the code; in C, one must check for errors (and manually propagate those errors) at every read; this applies a bit less in C++, though even there, the stdlib leaves some things to be desired (but generally speaking, they can be wrapped away).<p>Text encoding&#x2F;decoding, struct packing, and base64 aren&#x27;t in C or its standard library.<p>Now, in terms of speed, C wins hands down. (I wrote a minecraft file parser in both C++ and Python, and the difference was several orders of magnitude.)