I am not the one who posted here, why so aggressive?
Do not merge that. I once realized that grep is really fast, and replaced our custom solution with bash script, but I still claim that app is written in idiomatic PHP/python/ruby. This project has a lot of problems that it depends on C code is only a symptom. Noting all those bad things in a project Readme is a trap I fall into way to often it never works.
Mostly the latter but also a bit of the former: I could have optimised it further — at the expense of idiomaticity — but I believe gains would be marginal. Other than that, Python is not that fast so you pay some penalties there too.