@fdej: what successor to ctypes did you have in mind? Other than the names (I prefer i8 over c_int8, but easy to work around) and lack of ergonomic interop with python ints, are there other issues you're aware of?
This was originally a feature of ctypes but was dropped before stdlib inclusion because it's difficult to solve in the general, "public distribution" case. Nonetheless I don't think there's any need to replace ctypes to reintroduce it, it was done as a library / external tool before and still could be.
https://svn.python.org/projects/ctypes/trunk/ctypeslib/ctype...