Last week I gave a presentation in Sydney for the Open Source Developer’s Conference on the internals of the Python compiler. Now that the conference is over, I figure there’s no better place for the original paper than right here on my blog.

Thanks again to my employer, Shine for all their wonderful support with this. Thanks too to the folks who reviewed my paper before it was submitted and my colleagues at Shine who endured a painful test run that ran well over time! ;)

OSDC 2008 was a whole lot of fun. If you happened to miss the conference, I strongly recommend you make it along next year. It’s well worth the trip.

Download Python Language Internals: From Source to Execution, and a corresponding patch against Python 2.6 beta 3 (broken link) implementing the “unless” statement. If you want to test the patch, you also be aware of the nasty little circular dependency that may cause you some grief — apply the latest (non-review) patch from the tracker before you start the build and you should be fine.