I've been meaning to try out matcher[0] for usage with CtrlP, I'm not sure how well it works but it's written in C and is purported to speed up search. Not sure if it's still being maintained, however...
It works quite well. The only negative I've found is that using matcher seems to disable CtrlP's usual highlighting of which letters in a search result are matched.
There's not much to maintain. I ported the matcher from Command-T out of its ruby-C wrapper, and it more or less just works. I use it dozens or hundreds of times a day.
[0] https://github.com/burke/matcher