[alex-]

It might be interesting to some to know that relatively recently (2016) PEP 523 ( https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0523/ ) was created which provides a more efficient alternative to PyEval_SetTrace or PyEval_SetProfile for some use cases.

The idea of this PEP is to add frame evaluation into cPython. As the PEP says "For instance, it would not be difficult to implement a tracing or profiling function at the call level with this API"

Elizaveta Shashkova (a PyCharm developer at JetBrains) gave a really good talk on the subject at this years PyCon ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdObDUbLjdg ).