One reason for Python's popularity (and a reason for many of its quirks ...) is its strong ties to the C programming language. CPython, the reference Python interpreter, allows advanced users to interact with the interpreter's inner workings, and extend the Python language with code written in C.

This talk gives a very high-level overview of the CPython C API, and shows how to build a C extension in a few steps. It then discusses a popular use case for C extensions - optimizing performance of your Python programs! Finally we're gonna look at some modern alternatives to getting more performance out of your Python code, e.g. Cython.

About Steffen Wenz:

Steffen is the CTO of TrustYou (with offices in Cluj and Munich). TrustYou crawls and semantically analyzes all hotel reviews, and then generates a human-readable summary for each hotel on the planet. Did guests like the service? Was the location OK? Chances are you've seen our data on one of the many websites we license it to - among them Kayak and Google :) TrustYou is a Python company. We use Hadoop streaming and Pyspark to bring Python to the big data era. Steffen has been with TrustYou since 2008. His master thesis laid the foundation for TrustYou's scalable semantic analysis, which today understands 20 languages natively.