[aklein]

I noticed you interface with the native code via ctypes. I think cffi is generally preferred (eg, https://cffi.readthedocs.io/en/stable/overview.html#api-mode...). Although you'd have more flexibility if you build your own python extension module (eg using pybind), which will free you from a simple/strict ABI. Curious if this strict separation of C & Python was a deliberate design choice.

[nirw4nna]

Yes, when I designed the API I wanted to keep a clear distinction between Python and C. At some point I had two APIs: 1 in Python and the other in high-level C++ and they both shared the same low-level C API. I find this design quite clean and easy to work with if multiple languages are involved. When I'll get to perf I plan to experiment a bit with nanobind (https://github.com/wjakob/nanobind) and see if there's a noticeable difference wrt ctypes.

[almostgotcaught]

The call overhead of using ctypes vs nanobind/pybind is enormous

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31378277

Even if the number reported there is off, it's not far off because ctypes just calls out to libffi which is known to be the slowest way to do ffi.