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by marktangotango 4244 days ago
Nice overview of Python bytecode. Reminded me of the 'No Frills Introduction to Lua 5.1 VM Instructions'[1]. I have not seen a similar document for Python yet, is there one?

[1] http://luaforge.net/docman/83/98/ANoFrillsIntroToLua51VMInst...

1 comments

I don't think so; https://docs.python.org/3/library/dis.html#python-bytecode-i... was the closest I found when I was writing a compiler for a subset of Python, and that doc was a little sketchy and out of date. I ended up consulting the CPython source a lot and reading some helpful blog series:

http://docs.python.org/devguide/compiler.html http://akaptur.github.io/blog/categories/python-internals/ http://eli.thegreenplace.net/category/programming/python/pyt... http://tech.blog.aknin.name/category/my-projects/pythons-inn... http://www.matusiak.eu/numerodix/blog/category/python-intern...

Also Python 2 comes with a 'compiler' module which reimplements the built-in compiler in Python. (The real one is in C. The Python one was dropped from Python 3.)