efficiently create and fill array.array from C code?

[Stefan Behnel]

Thomas Jollans, 13.06.2010 19:15:
> 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.

Take a look at a) NumPy and b) Cython. You can also use Cython with the 
array module, but NumPy is a much more common way to deal with "number 
crunching routines", especially multi-dimentional arrays.

Cython interacts with both through the buffer interface, which Stephen 
Hansen already mentioned, but it also has support for Python versions that 
do not already have it, and it certainly makes the interaction between 
Python code and C code really easy. It's also an optimising (mostly) Python 
compiler that's used a lot for number crunching code, in case you are not 
really into writing the code in C.

Stefan