Original Post
I've written a module that uses ctypes and Tiny C to compile C source code from within a python program and makes it callable within python. Is this something the community would be interested in having? If so I can put up a page and post the code on my gamedev.net space for all to have. The application I'm currently working on has some performance critical sections where python just wasn't cutting it. It's easy to extend python with C using ctypes, but it's not very convenient when you only need to write very small amounts of performance-critical code in C. I found a few libraries that would suit this purpose one way or another, but I felt that they'd be too cumbersome for what I am doing. I did run across a very old, seemingly abandoned project called "C in Python" that used the Tiny C compiler and ctypes to compile C code from strings at run-time. It didn't work, but I thought it was a great idea, so I've rewritten it so that it works with the latest TCC and python 2.6. For now I've only tested it on linux 32 bit. It would need some modifications to work on Windows, but it shouldn't be difficult to do. It would probably work on Mac OS X also, but I couldn't get Tiny C to build on my mac. Here's a working example:
import ctypes
import compiler
# Defining functions that will be exported to python from the C source.
# compile expects a list of two-tuples containing first the name
# of the exported function in the C source code and the ctypes prototype
exports = (('fib', ctypes.CFUNCTYPE(ctypes.c_int, ctypes.c_int)),
('test_callback', ctypes.CFUNCTYPE(None)))
# defining a function to call back into from the C code
def callback():
print "Calling back into python WORKS!!!!"
# You can optionally make your python code available to the C program.
# compile expects a list of three-tuples containg first the name
# to use in the C source, the ctypes prototype, and the actual
# python function object to be called.
imports = (('callback', ctypes.CFUNCTYPE(None), callback),)
# The C source code
code = """
int fib(int n)
{
if (n <= 2)
return 1;
else
return fib(n-1) + fib(n-2);
}
void test_callback() {
callback();
}
"""
# compile returns a dictionary of callables. imports is optional.
lib = compiler.compile(exports, code, imports)
print "c fib result:", lib['fib'](30)
print "should see the same text repeated twice:"
callback()
lib['test_callback']()
