[Python-Dev] Wordcode: new regular bytecode using 16-bit units

[Nick Coghlan]

On 14 April 2016 at 08:26, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2016-04-14 0:11 GMT+02:00 Ryan Gonzalez <rymg19 at gmail.com>:
>> So code that depends on iterating through bytecode via HAS_ARG is going to
>> break...
>
> Sure. This change is backward incompatible for applications parsing
> bytecode in C or Python. That's why the patch also has to update the
> dis module.
>
> I don't see how you plan to keep the backwad compatibility, since the
> argument size changed from 2 bytes to 1 byte. You must update your
> code (written in C or Python or whatever).
>
> Hopefully, the dis was enhanced in Python 3.4: get_instructions() now
> gives nice Instructon objects rather than only pure text output.
>
> FYI I wrote my own library to decode and decode bytecode. It provides
> abstract bytecode objects to easily modify bytecode:
> https://bytecode.readthedocs.org/
>
> I suggest to use such library (or simply the dis module for simple
> needs) if you have to handle bytecode, rather than writing your own
> code.
>
> I know a few other projects which handle directly bytecode:
>
> * https://pypi.python.org/pypi/codetransformer
> * https://github.com/serprex/byteplay
> * https://pypi.python.org/pypi/coverage
>
> IHMO it's not a big deal to update these projects for the future
> Python 3.6. I can even help them to support the new bytecode format.

+1

We've also had previous discussions on adding a "minimum viable
bytecode editing" API to the standard library, and updating these
third party modules to support wordcode instead of bytecode could
provide a good use-case-driven opportunity for defining that (i.e. it
wouldn't be about providing an end user facing API directly, but
rather about letting CPython take care of the bookkeeping details for
things like lnotab and sorting out jump targets).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia