During software development, we often face a choice between a language's convenience and its performance. Python has gained popularity due to its simplicity and elegance, but when it comes to low-level operations or tasks requiring high performance and speed, C comes to the rescue.

We will be focusing specifically on integrating extensions at build time, not just loading libraries via ctypes.

In this article, I want to discuss how to integrate C extensions using the Python.h library. I will also explain how to create your own Python library with C extensions. We will explore how Python works internally — for example, we'll recall that everything is an object. I will use Poetry as my environment manager.

Everything will be demonstrated using my small library for various algorithms and computations. At the end, I will conduct an analysis of pure Python algorithms, our library, and pure C algorithms: execution speed, distributability, pros and cons, and code volume.

Without further ado, let's begin!