I think it may be interesting for others to see how to call easily a C routine from python, without implementing a python module. What you need is the ctypes module. Remeber however that apparently the use of this module is generally frowned upon, at least according to a note I found in PEP 399:

Usage of ``ctypes`` to provide an API for a C library will continue to be frowned upon as ``ctypes`` lacks compiler guarantees that C code typically relies upon to prevent certain errors from occurring (e.g., API changes).

although to be honest, it may be in the context of the PEP itself, and not as a general recommendation.

Nevertheless, suppose you want to call the function

double pow(double, double)

in the standard math library.

The first thing to do is to define the prototype of the function. You achieve this via the following:

prototype=ctypes.CFUNCTYPE(ctypes.c_double, ctypes.c_double, ctypes.c_double)

The call to ctypes.CFUNCTYPE creates a prototype object for a C function that returns a double (the first argument) and accepts two double (the second and third arguments).

Now you have a prototype. This entity is a class

>>> prototype
<class 'ctypes.CFunctionType'>

and you can bind this prototype to the actual function in the math library with the following. First you create an object representing the library

>>> dll=ctypes.cdll.LoadLibrary("libm.dylib") # on Mac. Linux use libm.so

and then you bind to the actual function

>>> pow = prototype(("pow", dll)
>>> pow(3,4)
81.0

This just brushes the surface, but I wanted to make a simple introductory post.