Python’s Innards: Introduction

A friend once said to me: You know, to some people, C is just a bunch of macros that expand to assembly. It’s been years ago (smartasses: it was also before llvm, ok?), but the sentence stuck with me. Do Kernighan and Ritchie really look at a C program and see assembly code? Does Tim Berners-Lee surf the Web any differently than you and me? And what on earth did Keanu Reeves see when he looked at all of that funky green gibberish soup, anyway? No, seriously, what the heck did he see there?! Uhm, back to the program. Anyway, what does Python look like in Guido van Rossum‘s1 eyes?

This post marks the beginning of what should develop to a series on Python’s internals, I’m writing it since I believe that explaining something is the best way to grok it, and I’d very much like to be able to visualize more of Python’s ‘funky green gibberish soup’ as I read Python code. On the curriculum is mainly CPython, mainly py3k, mainly bytecode evaluation (I’m not a big compilation fan) – but practically everything around executing Python and Python-like code (Unladen Swallow, Jython, Cython, etc) might turn out to be fair game in this series. For the sake of brevity and my sanity, when I say Python, I mean CPython unless noted otherwise. I also assume a POSIX-like OS or (if and where it matters) Linux, unless otherwise noted. You should read this if you want to know how Python works. You should read this if you want to contribute to CPython. You should read this to find all the mistakes I’ll make and snicker at me behind me back or write snide comments. I realize it’s just your particular way to show affection.

I gather I’ll glean pretty much everything I write about from Python’s source or, occasionally, other fine materials (documentation, especially this and that, certain PyCon lectures, searching python-dev, etc). Everything is out there, but I do hope my efforts at putting it all in one place to which you can RSS-subscribe will make your journey easier. I assume the reader knows some C, some OS theory, a bit less than some assembly (any architecture), a bit more than some Python and has reasonable UNIX fitness (i.e., feels comfortable installing something from source). Don’t be afraid if you’re not reasonably conversant in one (or more) of these, but I can’t promise smooth sailing, either. Also, if you don’t have a working toolchain to do Python development, maybe you’d like to head over here and do as it says on the second paragraph (and onwards, as relevant).

Read more: NIL: .to write(1) ~ help:about

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