Pythonforge? Do you mean PyPI, the main repository for Python frameworks and libraries that is the default download location of the flurry of Python install tools (setuptools, distribute, pip) and that contains 12487 packages? You never used it? Good sir, you are missing a little something.

Sorry, but I wonder if anyone of you have heard about things like "hotspot" and "jit" compilers. Server applications that are "performance-critical" like currency-exchange systems are actually built in Java (not J2EE mind you). Java Applications that run for a long time can outperform C applications, simply because the vm can use runtime information to make optimizations. C compilers can only make conservative optimizations because they rely solely on static analyses...