Is there a way to use C in a Python program without multiple files?

Question

I am taking part in a tournament that requires the submission of a single python file. The problem requires quite a bit of computation in very little time and any performance gain would be very beneficial.

What I am wondering is, can I utilize C in some way? I know about Cython as well as C extensions but they require more than one file which means they are unusable. Is there a way to execute compiled C from inside python without another file?

You may want to be careful about doing that, you're likely to give yourself a number of problems. For this competition, do you even know the architecture this would be run on? I'd expect that they'd expect pure Python. — Thomas Jager, Mar 29 '21 at 17:33
Does this answer your question? [Can we use C code in Python?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18762621/can-we-use-c-code-in-python) — Wilfred Almeida, Mar 29 '21 at 17:34
I see a way to do it but it would be quite time consuming, are you sure you want to go down this road? @WilfredAlmeida it is not a duplicate, he wants to it in a single file. — Antonin GAVREL, Mar 29 '21 at 17:34
@RunnersNum45 - _without another file_ - that means you're not allowed to use any `import`, right? — Armali, Mar 29 '21 at 17:38
Are you looking for something like perl's `use Inline 'C';`? — William Pursell, Mar 29 '21 at 18:53
I am allowed to import but @Armali but I cannot submit other files alongside my program. — RunnersNum45, Mar 29 '21 at 18:57

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 29 '21 at 17:52

You could achieve this in two folds, by first making your own package offering wrappers to your C code, and then publishing it with PyPi:

You first write a Python interface in C, I guess you already know how to do it.
You can follow this tutorial to publish your package, and then call your package with pip install your-package-name

Keep in mind that this process is quite lengthy, if you are in the middle of a competition I am not sure it would be the best solution, but I guess that if you ask this question you have already done all what you can do to optimize the algorithm part. You could also use one of the high performance libs that exist (numpy, pandas). If you are not even allowed to use pip then there is no way to do it in a single file.

NB: I assume that you are allowed to install packages through the terminal

This might be my best solution. I will try a test and if it works I'll mark this as the answer. — RunnersNum45, Mar 29 '21 at 19:04
Good luck with the implementation, let me know if it worked! Would also be interested to see the source code — Antonin GAVREL, Mar 29 '21 at 20:23

Is there a way to use C in a Python program without multiple files?

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