[Python-Dev] PyCharm debugger became 40x faster on Python 3.6 thanks to PEP 523

[Brett Cannon]

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 at 05:58 Serhiy Storchaka <storchaka at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 25.03.17 12:04, Victor Stinner wrote:
> >
> https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2017/03/inside-the-debugger-interview-with-elizaveta-shashkova/
> >
> > "What changed in Python 3.6 to allow this?
> >
> > The new frame evaluation API was introduced to CPython in PEP 523 and it
> > allows to specify a per-interpreter function pointer to handle the
> > evaluation of frames."
> >
> > Nice!
>
> Awesome! Any chance that pdb can utilize similar technique? Or this
> doesn't make sense for pdb?
>

I guess it's possible. It probably depends on how you're using the
debugger. It sounds like PyCharm is injecting bytecode for specified
 breakpoints and so I suspect the speed is only there when you press
 "debug" and are not stepping through line-by-line. Getting gdb to have the
same level of sophistication might not be too bad as long as you keep the
hook simple and you're okay injected new bytecode just before a frame
begins execution.
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