What does HackerNews think of pycparser?

You can also use pycparser[0]. It is fully compatible C99, but be careful it doesn't support gnu extensions (like attributes, #indent, asm() ...). You can however work around most of them by -D defining them to empty macro in the argument.

[0] https://github.com/eliben/pycparser

I see what you’re saying, but that piece of code doesn’t exist at all in JNR (so it can’t have bugs) and you can codegen JNR/FFI too to eliminate the same hole, right?

I feel like saying “don’t mess up this signature” is not only plausible but it’s a lot better than having to deal with writing and compiling the stub for every platform.

This is why pycparser exists, for example. https://github.com/eliben/pycparser

Here's a complete C frontend that uses the lex/yacc approach - https://github.com/eliben/pycparser (the Python ports of them, that is)

FWIW, if I had to do this again today I would certainly go for hand-written recursive descent. lex/yacc charm you in but eventually prove to be much more difficult to tweak and reason about.