CFFI 1.0 introduced a new out-of-line mode to reduce the overhead when running on CPython. See: - http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2015/05/cffi-101-released.html - https://cffi.readthedocs.org/en/latest/overview.html#out-of-line-example-abi-level-out-of-line (Wishlist item rather than bug.)