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That advice never works. The problem is data structures. If your high-level prototype uses complex data structures of e.g. Python, you will not be able to access them from C++. You will need to rewrite the whole thing anyway.

The only way you might get away with this approach is if your application is essentially a number of separate scripts that communicate through files. Then you can rewrite the key scripts in C++. But that is never the case for games.

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While rather similar to Python, Lua has a simple stack-based C API that makes this far less of a problem. OTOH, Lua was designed for embedded use from the start, and its stand-alone interpreter comes second.

Part of Civ IV (mostly gui stuff) is in python. They seem to be able to communicate with the C++ core fine.

But I assume they did not write the game in Python and the optimize parts in C++. Quite the opposite - they wrote it in C++ and then found that some part (e.g. GUI) is growing in complexity while not being crucial for performance, at which point it is a good decision to use a scripting language for it.

That is a pretty common approach, but what was suggested above (writing first in HLL and then rewriting parts in C++) is, to my knowledge, never done in practice.

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