This issue is pretty much summed up by the title. Python does manage to import the library and use it however only when the extension is .so otherwise python cannot find it and fails to import.

Can you please give a code snippet of the behavior you believe is incorrect? It is not clear to me what you mean by importing a library.

This is with regards to an python extension written in zig (I believe the same behaviour would occur from C as I am just using Python.h). What happens is when I compile the library on my mac it generates myLibrary.dylib file, when testing with python the following occurs:

    >>> import myLibrary
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'myLibrary'

However when changing the name of myLibrary.dylib to myLibrary.so python manages to import and use it as it should.

Thanks for the clarification. On most platforms other than Windows, Python expects compiled extension modules (usually written in C or C++) to have an extension of .so. This is true as well on macOS. Typically, extension modules are compiled using Python's Distutils, or one of its newer derivatives, which takes care of creating the proper extension module file name. If you are building an extension module with something else, you'll need to ensure that the shared library file name has the expected format. Note that PEP 3149, implemented in Python 3.2, extends the filename extension to include the Python version (although unversioned .so file names are still accepted for compatibility); see https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.2.html#pep-3149-abi-version-tagged-so-files for more information.

$ python3 -c 'import sysconfig;print(sysconfig.get_config_var("EXT_SUFFIX"))'
.cpython-39-darwin.so