[Python-Dev] Python Core Tools (original) (raw)

anatoly techtonik techtonik at gmail.com
Sun Oct 2 10:02:33 CEST 2011

Hello,

I've stumbled upon Dave Beazley's article [1] about trying ancient GIL removal patch at http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-removal-patch-of.html and looking at the output of Python dis module thought that it would be cool if there were tools to inspect, explain and play with Python bytecode. Little visual assembler, that shows bytecode and disassembly side by side and annotates the listing with useful hints (like interpreter code optimization decisions). That will greatly help many new people understand how Python works and explain complicated stuff like GIL and stackless by copy/pasting pictures from there. PyPy has a tool named 'jitviewer' [2] that may be that I am looking for, but the demo is offline.

But even without this tool I know that speakers at conferences create various useful scripts to gather interesting stats and visualize Python internals. I can name at least 'dev in a box' [3] project to get people started quickly with development, but I am sure there many others exist. Can you remember any tools that can be useful in Python core development? Maybe you use one every day? I'd like to compile a list of such tools and put in to Wiki to allow people have some fun with Python development without the knowledge of C.

  1. http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-removal-patch-of.html
  2. http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/08/visualization-of-jitted-code.html

  3. http://hg.python.org/devinabox/

    anatoly t.

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