In a Code Coffee meeting last month (9th July), we discussed ways of getting codes in different languages to talk to one another. This is quite a common task; for example, if you need your modern data analysis pipeline to interact with some legacy code (normally Fortran!), or if you have a mostly Python code that has a computationally-intensive bit that would be faster written in C. Our focus was on Python, C, and Fortran, since they seem to be the most commonly used languages in the group.
People brought a number of different solutions with them. Some were very easy to implement, just as a simple few-line block in your Python code that could be used to speed up a loop. Others were quite a bit more complicated, requiring extra work on building modules and getting your hands dirty with memory management, but having the virtue of being much more flexible...
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