You're probably aware of LuaJIT (http://http://luajit.org/ http://http://luajit.org/) already but I'll toss it in for other readers: as a former heavy user of c

You're probably aware of LuaJIT (http://http://luajit.org/ http://http://luajit.org/) already but I'll toss it in for other readers: as a former heavy user of ctypes, after discovering LuaJIT and its FFI I haven't touched ctypes again. For people who need to do this kind of work, it's worth looking into (enough so that one of the core PyPy developers is emulating LuaJIT's FFI design in the project Python CFFI http://cffi.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html http://cffi.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html).