speeding things up with C++

[bullockbefriending bard]

I've done all the requisite profiling and thought fairly deeply about
the efficiency of my python code, but am still going to have to speed
up the innermost guts of what I am doing.

Essentially, I need to pass a list of 6-tuples containing only
integers to my new sadly necessary super-fast compiled language
function which i am not looking forward to writing:

input: [(1,2,3,4,5,6), (7,8,9,10,11,12),...]

and after much thrashing of processor resources, return data which
looks like this to the Python calling environment:

output: [( (1, 2), (1,), (12,), (13), (1, 7, 11), (9,) ), (  another
nested tuple like preceding one  ), .... ]

Each member of the returned list is a tuple containing 6 tuples, and
each of those 6 tuples has at least one integer member. It would also
be acceptable for the return values to be entirely nested lists
instead of having the two innermost sequence types as tuples.

I probably want to be using something like C++ because i'm going to
need to use STL vectors and sets for what i'm doing in the algorithm
i'm trying to speed up. IIRC Boost tuple is a bit painful for more
than 10 elements + isn't really essential that I use a a non-mutable
data type in what will be a small encapsulated bit of a much larger
system.

Anyway, I can probably very quickly figure out some hacked way to get
the data into my function given that in the worst case I could take
advantage of the knowledge that each input tuple always has 6
elements, and simply pass in a big array of ints. Yes, I know this is
a bit retarded, but I'm talking worst case assuming on very tight
schedule and no time to delve deeply into SWIG or whatever. Similarly
it wouldn't be too difficult to return the result as the mother all of
all strings which i could then parse fairly easily.

However, I hope someone reading this will be able to tell me that I'm
being a total pessimist and that in fact it isn't very difficult to do
what I want to do using SWIG. I'm not asking for a complete solution,
more like some general pointers from someone who has actually done
something similar before.

As an added bonus, I wouldn't if this is 'easily' doable using Ocaml
as the guts instead of C++, I'd be happy to know about it.