pointers.py

Bringing the hell of pointers to Python

Why would you ever need this

• Documentation
• Source
• PyPI

Examples

from pointers import _

text: str = "hello world"
ptr = _&text  # creates a new pointer object
ptr <<= "world hello"
print(text)  # world hello

from pointers import c_malloc, c_free, strcpy, printf

ptr = c_malloc(3)
strcpy(ptr, "hi")
printf("%s\n", ptr)  # hi
c_free(ptr)

from pointers import malloc, free

my_str = malloc(103)
my_str <<= "hi"
second_str = my_str[51]
second_str <<= "bye"
print(*my_str, *second_str)  # hi bye
free(my_str)

Features

• Fully type safe
• Pythonic pointer API
• Bindings for the entire C standard library and CPython ABI
• Segfaults

Why does this exist?

The main purpose of pointers.py is to simply break the rules of Python, but has some other use cases:

• Can help C/C++ developers get adjusted to Python
• Provides a nice learning environment for programmers learning how pointers work
• Makes it very easy to manipulate memory in Python
• Why not?

Installation

Linux/macOS

python3 -m pip install -U pointers.py

Windows

py -3 -m pip install -U pointers.py