Dynamic programming languages such as Python offer expressive power and programmer productivity at the expense of performance. Although the topic of optimizing Python has received considerable attention over the years, a key obstacle remains elusive: C extensions. Time and again, optimized run-time environments, such as JIT compilers and optimizing interpreters, fall short of optimizing across C extensions, as they cannot reason about the native code hiding underneath.

To bridge this gap, we present an analysis of C extensions for Python. The analysis data indicates that C extensions come in different varieties. One such variety is to merely speed up a single thing, such as reading a file and processing it directly in C. Another variety offers broad access through an API, resulting in a domain-specific language realized by function calls.

While the former variety of C extensions offer little optimization potential for optimizing run-times, we find that the latter variety does offer considerable optimization potential. This optimization potential rests on dynamic locality that C extensions cannot readily tap. We introduce a new, interpreter-based optimization leveraging this untapped optimization potential called Cross-Module Quickening. The key idea is that C extensions can use an optimization interface to register highly-optimized operations on C extension-specific datatypes. A quickening interpreter uses these information to continuously specialize programs with C extensions.

To quantify the attainable performance potential of going beyond C extensions, we demonstrate a concrete instantiation of Cross-Module Quickening for the interpreter and the popular C extension. We evaluate our implementation with the benchmark suite and report performance improvements by a factor of up to 2.82.