[joss82]

`ctypes` is part of Python's standard library and allows you to directly call C functions from Python code.

It's glorious in its simplicity.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/ctypes.html

[masklinn]

"Glorious" and "simplicity" are definitely words I've never read about ctypes before.

"Wonky" and "terrifying", a lot more. ctypes is... useful, but it also uses somewhat strange terminology which can be hard to match to C's as it's trying to bridge C and Python. And when getting it wrong is an UB, it's pretty frustrating.

[jofer]

It also doesn't help you use numpy arrays with C functions, which is one of the big selling points of cython.

[ali_m]

You can absolutely use numpy arrays with C functions using ctypes. Numpy has `numpy.ctypeslib` which takes care of some of the boilerplate involved.