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Various people have asked on c.l.p about documentation of CPython's
virtual machine internals. The usual answers have been to see the dis
module doc for bytecodes and 'read the code' for more. Jakob Sievers
did so and posted his notes, with additions from Martin v. Löwis, as

http://wiki.python.org/moin/CPythonVmInternals

Terry Reedy wrote:
> Various people have asked on c.l.p about documentation of CPython's
> virtual machine internals. The usual answers have been to see the dis
> module doc for bytecodes and 'read the code' for more. Jakob Sievers
> did so and posted his notes, with additions from Martin v. Löwis, as
>
> http://wiki.python.org/moin/CPythonVmInternals

That's interesting. It's dumber than I thought. All temporaries
on the stack are "boxed" as PyObjects. That's simple and portable,
but slow.

John Nagle

> That's interesting. It's dumber than I thought. All temporaries
> on the stack are "boxed" as PyObjects. That's simple and portable,
> but slow.

Not only that - Python does not ever have the concept of unboxed
values, except for local variables in the C implementations of
arithmetic operations and system calls.

Using true objects is slow only if allocation and deallocation is
slow, which it fortunately isn't.

Regards,
Martin