ctypes : Loading simple C library in Python 2.5+
Just discovered this when I was glancing through the pystream (a CUDA library for Python) source codes. In Python2.5+, it is possible to directly load simple C shared libraries from Python without the need for writing C wrappers for it. ( SWIG or manually writing one ). This can be achieved using the Python ctypes module. Lets take a simple example: /* test.c */ int multiply(int a,int b){ return a * b; } Compile it as a SO library (ref: Writing and using shared libraries ): gcc -c -fPIC test.c gcc -shared -fPIC -o libtest.so test.o Now we got an SO file with a test function, lets load it in Python In [1]: import ctypes In [2]: libtest = ctypes.cdll.LoadLibrary('/path/to/libtest.so') In [3]: libtest.multiply(30,99) Out[3]: 2970 Hope this would be useful to someone. More details : http://docs.python.org/library/ctypes.html Happy Hacking :D