Ah, ctypes

[Nick Craig-Wood]

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo at geek-central.gen.new_zealand> wrote:
>  I wrote some code months ago to output 1-bit-per-pixel PNG files from
>  Python, doing direct calls to libpng using ctypes, because PIL didn't give
>  me sufficient control over colour tables and pixel depths.
> 
>  I thought the code was working fine. I left it aside for some months, came
>  back to it a week or two ago, and found it was crashing. I was creating
>  CFUNCTYPE objects to do callbacks to my own I/O routines
[snip]
>      Make sure you keep references to CFUNCTYPE objects as long as they are
>      used from C code. ctypes doesn’t, and if you don’t, they may be garbage
>      collected, crashing your program when a callback is made.
> 
>  Yup, that was it. I changed my installation of the callbacks from
[snip]

As a ctypes user I found this an interesting story - thanks for
posting it!

ctypes could potentially note that function types don't have enough
references to them when passed in as arguments to C functions?  It
might slow it down microscopically but it would fix this problem.

-- 
Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick