Book Image

Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja

Book Image

Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja

Overview of this book

This book covers the unexplored secrets of Python, delve into its depths, and uncover its mysteries. You’ll unearth secrets related to the implementation of the standard library, by looking at how modules actually work. You’ll understand the implementation of collections, decimals, and fraction modules. If you haven’t used decorators, coroutines, and generator functions much before, as you make your way through the recipes, you’ll learn what you’ve been missing out on. We’ll cover internal special methods in detail, so you understand what they are and how they can be used to improve the engineering decisions you make. Next, you’ll explore the CPython interpreter, which is a treasure trove of secret hacks that not many programmers are aware of. We’ll take you through the depths of the PyPy project, where you’ll come across several exciting ways that you can improve speed and concurrency. Finally, we’ll take time to explore the PEPs of the latest versions to discover some interesting hacks.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introduction


Python is an interpreted language. Interpreted languages use middleware to read the source code and generate system-specific machine language. Compiled languages use a compiler to convert the source code directly into machine language; there is no middle step in the process.

The benefit of compiled languages is that, without the interpretation step, the code is executed directly by the system and yields the fastest processing time available. In addition, compilers have the ability to look at the source code as it is being converted and apply optimizations to make the machine code that much faster.

For example, if the compiler is analyzing the source code and sees that code spends a large amount of time in a particular loop, it can apply one of several optimization algorithms to the code to improve performance, such as breaking a single loop into multiple loops that each process a smaller part of the original loop's body.

Conversely, interpreted languages make the life of a programmer...