Mastering Python

CFFI

The CFFI library offers options very similar to ctypes, but it's a bit more direct. Unlike the ctypes library, a C compiler is really a necessity for CFFI. With it comes the opportunity to directly call your C compiler in a very easy way:

>>> import cffi
>>> ffi = cffi.FFI()
>>> ffi.cdef('int printf(const char* format, ...);')
>>> libc = ffi.dlopen(None)
>>> arg = ffi.new('char[]', b'spam')
>>> libc.printf(arg)
4
spam>>>

Okay… so that looks a bit weird right? We had to define how the printf function looks and specify the arguments to printf with a valid C type declaration. Getting back to the declarations, however, instead of None to ffi.dlopen, you can also specify the library you wish to load. If you remember the ctypes.util.find_library ...