It does, but you still need to manually declare all the types and functions. And then, since it's C, you also have to deal with low-level stuff like memory management for strings and other buffers.

Whereas someone working with, say, C# or Java, can just go and find a library that's native to their language, ready to use out of the box (even if internally it wraps that very same C library).

It's the usual curse of a small ecosystem. Things were different back when Delphi was popular.

Oh. I used SWIG to automate a lot of that. It'll build the wrappers for you. The upside with it is that you don't have to wait for package maintainers to update your bindings.