It is sometimes useful to call Python from Matlab. There may be a robust implementation of an optimizer that hasn’t been well-ported to Python yet. What to do in this situation?
There is a simple strategy that should do: first, figure out how to call python from stand-alone C functions, and then use that code within a mex function. While tedious, at least this is straightforward. By using the not terribly complicated PyObject stuff we can create python objects in C, send them to python functions, and unpack whatever the python functions give us back.
However, everything goes bad if we try to import numpy in our python code. We’ll get an error that looks like this:
……../pylib/numpy/core/multiarray.so:
undefined symbol: _Py_ZeroStruct
even though all the required symbols are defined in libpython2.x.
This problem was asked several times on stackoverflow, with no satisfactory answer. But luckily, after much searching, I stumbled upon https://github.com/pv/pythoncall which discovered a way to solve this problem.
Basically, matlab imports dynamic libraries in a peculiar way that messes up the symbols somehow. But if we execute the code
int dlopen_python_hack(){
if (!dlopen_hacked){
printf(“Preloading the library for the hack: %s\n”, LIBPYTHON_PATH);
dlopen(LIBPYTHON_PATH, RTLD_NOW|RTLD_GLOBAL);
dlopen_hacked = 1;
}
}
where LIBPYTHON_PATH points to libpython2.x.so, then suddenly all the messed-up symbols will fix themselves, and we won’t have undefined symbol problems anymore.
Neural Networks Blog 