Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2016 13:28:21 +0200 From: Michael Bieri

I'm not quite sure which approach is state-of-the-art as of 2016. How would you do it if you had to make a C/C++ library available in Python right now?

In my case, I have a C library with some scientific functions on matrices and vectors. You will typically call a few functions to configure the computation, then hand over some pointers to existing buffers containing vector data, then start the computation, and finally read back the data. The library also can use MPI to parallelize.

Depending on how minimal and universal you want to keep things, I use the ctypes approach quite often, i.e. treat your numpy inputs an outputs as arrays of doubles etc using the ndpointer(...) syntax. I find it works well if you have a small number of well-defined functions (not too many options) which are numerically very heavy. With this approach I usually wrap each method in python to check the inputs for contiguity, pass in the sizes etc. and allocate the numpy array for the result. Peter