4x is low:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...
Roughly speaking, anything time-critical needs to be done in c.
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...
Roughly speaking, anything time-critical needs to be done in c.
As to "normal" people, I do a lot of numerical computing using python+C. I end up with probably 90% of the code in python, and 10% inner loops in C. That's typically enough that the C code is taking, say, 50% of the time, at which it isn't worth it (for me) to move more python into C, since I could never buy myself more than a factor of 2 speedup.