Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

Integrating existing code written in different languages

Although computer science is young when compared to other fields of technical studies, many programmers have written a lot of useful libraries for solving common problems using many programming languages. It would be a great loss to forget about all that heritage every time a new programming language pops out, but it is also impossible to reliably port any piece of software that was ever written to every possible language.

The C and C++ languages seem to be the most important languages that provide a lot of libraries and implementations that you would like to integrate into your application code without the need to port them completely to Python. Fortunately, CPython is already written ...