On Performance

Having spent a lot of time with Python in the last couple of years, I've often come across the claim that while Python is not nearly as fast as C, it is, more often than not, fast enough. I agree that this is generally true, and I was gladly surprised on how far I could go with pygext using pure (psyco-accelerated) Python for everything (of course, pygame and pyopengl called SDL and OpenGL in the background).

Games are a pretty different kind of beast when it comes to optimization, and a somewhat generic game framework even more so. They can never really be "fast enough". There are two main goals that improving the framework performance attains: 1) You can put more stuff on the screen. More enemies, more particles, more background layers OR 2) Your game will have lesser system requirements, allowing you to reach a wider audience.

That is the line of thought that convinced me to try and rewrite the core of pygext using C++ instead of Python. I'm only a few days in, but things are progressing pretty nicely so far. I'll post some benchmarks as soon as all basic funtionality has been re-implemented.