Why Python?

We like Python. It is a simple, fast and elegant programming language. It allows faster, agile and robust software development. Some people wrongly assume that Python applications are automatically slow and bloated. This is untrue for many reasons:

• Python is actually surprisingly fast in many cases.
• Python is not the performance bottleneck here. Seriously. GStreamer and GES are the components doing the heavy work, and they are written in C. Pitivi is basically just a pretty user interface on top of those.
• Most performance issues on desktop apps are not micro-optimization problems, but I/O bound operations or “stupid algorithms/methods that do unnecessary work”. Federico Mena Quintero did a great presentation (video, slides) along those lines a couple of years ago.

Most of what I highlighted above can also be found in Python's page on speed and performance tips.