This sounds like a good argument for translating Python into C++.
Here's another: that business of explicitly managing reference counts
could be greatly simplified using C++ constructors and destructors.
This would make the job of writing extension modules less error prone.
Ignore for a moment the fact that it would be a lot of work,
and consider this: Python is written in C because C is ubiquitous.
Since Python began, C++ has become much more widely available.
There are now multiple PC and Mac compilers, and GNU seems to cover the
Unix platforms. Is C++ now sufficiently widely available that converting
Python to C++ makes sense?