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Python-to-C++ Compiler
Mark Dufour writes "Shed Skin is an experimental Python-to-C++ compiler. It accepts pure, but implicitly statically typed, Python programs, and generates optimized C++ code. This means that, in combination with a C++ compiler, it allows for translation of pure Python programs into highly efficient machine language. For a set of 16 non-trivial test programs, measurements show a typical speedup of 2-40 over Psyco, about 12 on average, and 2-220 over CPython, about 45 on average. Shed Skin also outputs annotated source code."
Because Python is WAY faster and easier to write, and it's highly optimized C++ under the hood, far more optimized than (all due respect) you're likely to be able write in one try. For example, if you know both languages, write a C++ program to read a large text file (1G+)into memory, do something to it, and write it back out. Then do it in Python. Do a time comparison of the execution and of the time it took you to write each.
After four hours of tweaking, our expert C++ programmer was finally able to write something that beat our ten lines of Python code that took under five minutes to write. And it didn't beat it by much, whereas the first pass at a C++ version was an order of magnitude slower.