JSON-C Object Relational Mapping Structures: strictly-typed serializable structures for Python
JCORMS provides a means to create structures for seamlessly passing data between Python and C APIs. The design use case is for Python packages that manipulate input files for applications written in other, more strictly-typed languages--notably C or even modern Fortran. In some cases, these applications use JSON-like data structures, so it is important to be able to serialize these structures to dictionaries of primitives compatible with JSON. The goal is to make the code necessary for the serialization transparent to the user.
JCORMS also provides an alternative foreign function interface (FFI) to
ctypes. While ctypes provides just-in-time conversion of data from Python to
C datatypes, JCORMS provides eager type coercion at assignment time. Data is
stored in C buffers so that at API call time a pointer to the buffer can be
passed with no delay. Having the type coercion happening at the C level instead
of Python will also provide some performance benefits over a wrapper to
ctypes.