Wrapping a C library in Python with ctypes
Wrapping a C library in Python allows us to leverage existing C code or to implement a critical part of the code in a fast language such as C.
It is relatively easy to use externally-compiled libraries with Python. The first possibility is to call a command-line executable with the os.system() command, but this method does not extend to compiled libraries.
A more powerful method consists of using a native Python module called ctypes. This module allows us to call functions defined in a compiled library (written in C) from Python. The ctypes module takes care of data type conversions between C and Python. In addition, the numpy.ctypeslib module provides facilities to use NumPy arrays wherever data buffers ...
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