A self-contained micro-benchmark harness for measuring the per-call cost of ctypes-based library wrappers. It runs an outlet and inlet in the same process over loopback, pre-fills buffers, and measures conversion overhead independent of network latency. Supports configurable channel counts, data formats, chunk sizes, and JSON output for before/after comparison. The pattern of timeit with best-of-repeats, result aggregation, and geometric mean speedup is reusable for any ctypes-bound library.

Contains the find_liblsl_libraries generator function that implements a robust, cross-platform search strategy for locating a native shared library. It checks environment variable (PYLSL_LIB), package directory, system library paths via ctypes.util.find_library, the active Python environment's lib directory, and macOS Frameworks. This pattern is directly reusable for any Python project that needs to locate and load a native library with fallback logic.

The _to_str function provides a robust fallback for decoding bytes that may not be valid UTF-8 (e.g., hostnames from Windows ANSI code page). It first attempts UTF-8 decoding and falls back to latin-1, which cannot fail and preserves all bytes. This is a small but critical utility pattern applicable to any project that receives text from external systems with uncertain encoding.