Hugging Abstract Syntax Trees: A Pythonic Love Story

In this presentation, we'll take a look at how we might go about building languages in Python that compile to Python bytecode and run on the Python VM -- all without knowing a thing about the nature or semantics of Python bytecode.

We'll do this by exploiting an interesting feature introduced in Python 2.6 that allows one to compile Python Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) to bytecode from within Python itself. Further, we'll show the resulting compilers can generate code that is interoperable with all your existing Python code -- including the standard & third party libraries.