CPython Virtual Machine Internals

The virtual machine is the most interesting part of any bytecode based programming language because this is where all the action happens. Also, if you intend to hack on CPython you need to understand how this code works.

In this session we will cover the following topics:

• What is a bytecode virtual machine
• CPython’s bytecode format
  • What are the different bytecode instructions
  • How are the instructions packed
• High level overview of CPython’s virtual machine design
• Walk through of CPython’s virtual machine implementation
  • We will see how the virtual machine code is organized and look at the main entry point through which code execution happens
  • We will also discuss some of the optimization techniques that are implemented to improve its performance