> The beautiful thing about ctypes is that you don't have to declare all the function prototypes and type declarations when you use a shared library. You simply make sure to feed the functions the properly typed variables, and store the returned value properly, and it just works.
It just works... until the argument that you passed as int but is actually size_t makes the program crash on 64-bit. Or you have to use an API which includes a giant structure which you then must transcribe manually into Python. Or you need to use a system library located at different paths on different platforms.
In my opinion, ctypes isn't the worst, but a sane C FFI should allow you to specify some #includes and -ls and automatically extract the proper declarations and linkage. cffi only partially satisfies this, since you have to add declarations manually and then have cffi "verify" them using a C compiler, but it's still better than ctypes.
It just works... until the argument that you passed as int but is actually size_t makes the program crash on 64-bit. Or you have to use an API which includes a giant structure which you then must transcribe manually into Python. Or you need to use a system library located at different paths on different platforms.
In my opinion, ctypes isn't the worst, but a sane C FFI should allow you to specify some #includes and -ls and automatically extract the proper declarations and linkage. cffi only partially satisfies this, since you have to add declarations manually and then have cffi "verify" them using a C compiler, but it's still better than ctypes.