efficiently create and fill array.array from C code?

[Thomas Jollans]

Hi,

I'm writing some buffer-centric number-crunching routines in C for
Python code that uses array.array objects for storing/manipulating data.
I would like to:

1. allocate a buffer of a certain size
2. fill it
3. return it as an array.

I can't see any obvious way to do this with the array module, but I was
hoping somebody here might be able to help. My best shot would be to:

1. create a bytearray with PyByteArray_FromStringAndSize(NULL, byte_len)
2. fill its buffer
3. initialize an array from the bytearray.

The issue I have with this approach is that array will copy the data to
its own buffer. I'd much rather create an array of a certain size, get a
write buffer, and fill it directly -- is that possible?

I expect that numpy allows this, but I don't really want to depend on
numpy, especially as they haven't released a py3k version yet.

-- Thomas