A simple example of creating a python module using C or C++ code. Particularly, this repository shows how to pass a numpy array to a C function, and vice versa.

Folder simplest contains a minimum working example of calling a C function from a Python program.

Folder reference contains a reference example using good practices for organizing your files. It includes:

• Using numpy.ctypeslib.ndpointer for defining the input and output arguments of the C call. This is usefull for avoiding segmentation faults;
• Defining an interface for the C library;
• Caling C++ code;

1. Clone the repository
2. cd into directory "simplest" or "reference"
3. run "make"
4. call "python script.py"

There are many other approaches for integrating C/C++ code and Python, such as Cython, CFFI, pybind11 and Boost.Python. If your interface between Python and C/C++ is really thin, that is, all you want to do is send some matrix to a C/C++ program, run some heavy calculation, and get the data back to Python, then I think ctypes is a great solution. It is a standard library and requires very little additional code. For other uses cases, the other approaches should be preferred.