Question

Can APIs written in C or C++ always be made into a library, given source code, and consequently be called from Python, due to the intrinsic callable nature of an API?

In other words, given a C/C++ API can you run a setup.py script using distutils on the source and effectively use the C/C++ API from python programs?

Answer 1

It’s a bit more involved than running a setup.py script, but there are tools to wrap C/C++ libraries so you can use them from Python. Some popular ones are:

• Cython – you write Python-style code, but you can cimport C libraries and call their functions. Cython code is then translated to C and compiled. There’s an unsupported tool called cython-codegen to automate writing a simple wrapper.
• boost.python – For wrapping C++ libraries.
• SWIG
• ctypes – Load compiled libraries and call them directly from Python. ctypesgen tries to automatically write a wrapper based on header files.

Certain projects use other tools to generate Python bindings, and they could probably be reused (with varying amounts of effort). PyQt4 uses SIP, PySide (another Qt binding) has shiboken, and GTK et al. have Gobject introspection.