A standard assembly format for Python bytecode
Background
Currently, CPython’s internal bytecode format stores instructions with no args as 1 byte, instructions with small args as 3 bytes, and instructions with large args as 6 bytes (actually, a 3-byte EXTENDED_ARG followed by a 3-byte real instruction).
Unified call syntax
If you want to skip all the tl;dr and cut to the chase, jump to Concrete Proposal.
8Why heapq isn't a type
Many people, when they first discover the heapq module, have two questions:
Why does it define a bunch of functions instead of a container type? Why don't those functions take a key or reverse parameter, like all the other sorting-related stuff in Python? Why not a type?
At the abstract level, it'
Unpacked Bytecode
Currently, in CPython, if you want to process bytecode, either in C or in Python, it’s pretty complicated.
The built-in peephole optimizer has to do extra work fixing up jump targets and the line-number table, and just punts on many cases because they’re too hard to deal with.
Everything is dynamic
One common "advanced question" on places like StackOverflow and python-list is "how do I dynamically create a function/method/class/whatever"? The standard answer is: first, some caveats about why you probably don't want to do that, and then an explanation of the various ways to do it when you reall
1Wordcode
A few years ago, Cesare di Mauro created a project called WPython, a fork of CPython 2.6.4 that “brings many optimizations and refactorings”. The starting point of the project was replacing the bytecode with “wordcode”. However, there were a number of other changes on top of it.
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