Performance differences between Python and C

Question

Working on different projects I have the choice of selecting different programming languages, as long as the task is done.

I was wondering what the real difference is

Answer 1

C will absolutely crush Python in almost any performance category, but C is far more difficult to write and maintain and high performance isn't always worth the trade off of increased time and difficulty in development.

You say you're doing things like text file processing, but what you omit is how much text file processing you're doing. If you're processing 10 million files an hour, you might benefit from writing it in C. But if you're processing 100 files an hour, why not use python? Do you really need to be able to process a text file in 10ms vs 50ms? If you're planning for the future, ask yourself, "Is this something I can just throw more hardware at later?"

Writing solid code in C is hard. Be sure you can justify that investment in effort.