cffi'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

cffi'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.