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We've had a lot of success combining that approach (cffi instead of ctypes) with property-based testing (https://github.com/HypothesisWorks/hypothesis) for the query engine at backtrace: https://engineering.backtrace.io/2020-03-11-how-hard-is-it-t... .

Have you exposed the C library to Python via ctypes as OP or have you taken a different approach?

Just cffi, and keeping the headers free of inline implementation noise (a side benefit, in my opinion).