What is the difference between ctypes.pointer, ctypes.POINTER, and ctypes.byref?

Question

In ctypes, what is the difference between pointer and byref? They both seem like a way to pass a pointer to a function, for example as an output parameter.

Answer 1

Functionally, they are equivalent.

However, the python docs do point out that

pointer does a lot more work since it constructs a real pointer object, so it is faster to use byref if you don't need the pointer object in Python itself.