Ability to wrap existing ctype with llvmlite objects?

[SamKG]

If I have an existing ctype object, is there any way for me to create a llvmlite object that refers to the ctype object?

[sklam]

I will need more details to answer your question. With "refers to", do you want a pointer to the ctypes object in memory? You can do so by referring to it as a void* (i.e. i8*) from llvmlite.

If you want to manipulate the ctypes data, it will be more involved.

[SamKG]

Yes, by 'refer' I mean as a pointer to the ctype object. What would prevent me from modifying the data directly?

[sklam]

There are multiple ways:

• To pass ctypes object into a LLVM jitted function, see example at https://github.com/numba/llvmlite/blob/master/examples/sum.py.
• To reference in-memory ctypes object as a global value, you can use inttoptr to convert the address directly into a pointer to the data.
• You can also use add_symbol() to bind the address to a global variable name.

Also take a look at https://godbolt.org/z/qvBotR to understand what LLVM IR to emit.