Crimes

Blur the line between C and Python.

First, write some C code:

/* hello.c */
#include <stdio.h>

void hello(void) {
    printf("Hello world from C!\n");
}

Then import that C code into Python:

import crimes

crimes.commit()

from hello import hello

hello()  # prints "Hello world from C!"

All you had to do is call crimes.commit()!

What if I am a terrible C programmer?

Not to worry! crimes will print your syntax errors as part of the normal Python traceback:

/* hello.c */
#include <stdio.h>

/* missing ')' on the next line: */
void hello(void {
    printf("Hello world from C!\n");
}

import crimes

crimes.commit()

from hello import hello  # raises an error here

Gives you this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/tmp/example.py", line 6, in <module>
    from hello import hello  # type: ignore
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/tmp/hello.c", line 5, in hello.c
    void hello(void {
                    ^
crimes.exceptions.CCompileError: expected ';', ',' or ')' before '{' token

Install

Warning

This is currently pretty hacky. I provide absolutely no guarantee that this will work on your machine. Here's how I got it working on my machine, which running macOS. I highly doubt this library works at all on Windows.

First, install the library:

pip install crimes

Next, make sure you have a compatible version of GCC. Any version of GCC 9.0 or greater should work. On most Linux distros, you probably already have this installed. On macOS though... Apple thought it was a good idea to symlink gcc to clang. This does not work. So first, install actual GCC using brew:

brew install gcc@13

Next, before using this module, make sure that CC is set to use gcc-13. You can do this universally like this:

export CC=gcc-13

...but I prefer to do it per-process:

env CC=gcc-13 python3 my-program-that-commits-crimes.py

Copying

Copyright © 2023 Eddie Antonio Santos. Apache-2.0 licensed. See LICENSE for details. Especially the Disclaimer of Warranty!