I would like to point out that while (c)python reliance on C seem to be the problem here, it is not inherent to general use of C either. Again, Lua vs. LuaJit prove that a Jit implementation can be a drop in to an other (non Jit) one.
On Gentoo, I tend to force applications to link against LuaJit and it works just fine.
Message written in LuaKit using AwesomeWM and my alt+tag show VLC, Wireshark and MySql Workbench running, all on LuaJit to some level of success (most are flawless). All of those applications doesn't (AFIAK) officially support LuaJit.
LuaJIT isn't a perfect drop-in, however, as it has various limitations that base Lua doesn't (in addition to the obvious ones if you're using Lua 5.2 features, which LuaJIT doesn't support).
In my case it's because of LuaJIT has address-space limitations that standard Lua does not, due to its use of NaN-encoding for pointers. There are some inputs where LuaJIT simply runs out of memory (or rather, address-space), which work fine when run using standard Lua.
[For my app the speedup from LuaJIT isn't so great anyway, so it's just a minor annoyance.]
On Gentoo, I tend to force applications to link against LuaJit and it works just fine.
Message written in LuaKit using AwesomeWM and my alt+tag show VLC, Wireshark and MySql Workbench running, all on LuaJit to some level of success (most are flawless). All of those applications doesn't (AFIAK) officially support LuaJit.