The Hidden Power of the Python Runtime

Retrieve useful information from Python runtime and build development tools based on it

Elizaveta Shashkova

Debugging Development Python general Tooling

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Many people like Python for its simplicity and beauty. But every statement in Python, even the simple one, produces a lot of events during the program execution. These events are usually hidden from a user, so it helps developers to skip low-level implementation details and focus on bigger things.

At the same time many parts of this hidden information are very useful and interesting to examine. The good news is that Python Runtime allows to retrieve it really simply, so there is no need to configure additional libraries or pass additional parameters to interpreter. Everybody can do it right inside their Python code.

During this talk we will learn how Python allows to inspect current program state during the execution. We will learn about Python variables, frame objects and useful information they store. After that we will discuss several powerful tools which are based on the runtime information and which can be helpful for any Python programmer in their everyday life.

Type: Talk (30 mins); Python level: Intermediate; Domain level: Intermediate


Elizaveta Shashkova

JetBrains

Elizaveta Shashkova is a software developer of the PyCharm IDE at JetBrains. She is working on the Python debugger and Data Science tools.