I am trying to bridge two libraries, one a C library bound into python using ctypes, and the other a C++ library using Boost Python.

In the C++ library, I have a class similar to the following, with a member function that returns a pointer to an internal buffer.

struct Test

{

float data[16];

float *get_data() {return data;}

}

I have wrapped this in a seeming logical way:

BOOST_MODULE(test) {

class_<Test>("Test")

.def("get_data", &Test::get_data, return_value_policy< return_by_value >();

}

Which suffices to retrieve a "float *" instance from Python. However, I need to pass this pointer to a ctypes-bound function:

void some_function(float *);

I can call this function from python without any trouble, using a ctypes created buffer:

buffer = (c_float * 16)

some_function(buffer)

However, when I attempt to pass the result of get_data() into this function, ctypes causes an error because Boost Python's "float *" type does not match ctypes' POINTER(c_float) type. Equally, ctypes' cast() function doesn't work to coerce the pointer type, because it doesn't recognise the "float *" type either.

Does anyone have a workaround to coerce these types (which each contain the same underlying pointer) together?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions,

- Tristam