There's a nice FFI for C stuff, but writing glue for C++ is more work.

FFI into C++ is a lot of work in any language. A lot of projects just define a plain C wrapper for the C++ code they want to call, and call that C code from whatever their glue language is.

However, Python does have CLIF[1], which is the nicest solution for calling into C++ that I'm aware of.

[1] https://github.com/google/clif

How does CLIF compare to PyBind11[1]?

[1] https://github.com/pybind/pybind11