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I am a python programmer who has yet to dive into ctypes, and I am curious if you have ever played with cffi[1], and if so, thoughts? The project seems to be ai
by untothebreach 13y ago
I am a python programmer who has yet to dive into ctypes, and I am curious if you have ever played with cffi[1], and if so, thoughts? The project seems to be aimed at the same use cases that you would use ctypes for.
1: http://cffi.readthedocs.org/en/release-0.8/ http://cffi.readthedocs.org/en/release-0.8/
- jnbiche 13y agocffi's API is similar to LuaJIT's, so if you're familiar and comfortable with that, then cffi might be a good option. If you're looking at creating your whole application around C extensions for Python, as in the case with some Cython apps, then libffi might be a good alternative. I've never used it, so I can't make any empirical observations about cffi (unlike Cython, which I've used -- it's awesome). The great thing about all these newish ways to interface with C code in Python is that we no longer have to write Python extensions in C. I like C, but writing Python extensions in C was very painful and tedious for me. So all these options are a good thing. Otherwise, I think ctypes is a more convenient option (it's always available, no extra installations required). Also, the ctypes API is much more Pythonic, in my opinion.
- untothebreach 13y agoThanks for the thoughts!
- vishvananda 13y agoI really like cffi for interacting with external c libraries. See for example my post on talking to openssl using cffi: http://unchainyourbrain.com/using-openssl-from-python-with-python-cffi http://unchainyourbrain.com/using-openssl-from-python-with-p...