Where To Use A Pyc File

I want to know what a pyc file(python bytecode) is. I want to know all the details. I want to know about how pyc files interface with the compiler. Is it a replacement for exe? Doe

Solution 1:

Python bytecode requires Python to run, cannot be ran standalone without Python, and is specific to a particular x.y release of Python. It should be portable across platforms for the same version. There is not a common reason for you to use it; Python uses it to optimize out parsing of your .py file on repeated imports. Your life will be fine ignoring the existence of pyc files.

Solution 2:

From the docs:

As an important speed-up of the start-up time for short programs that use a lot of standard modules, if a file called spam.pyc exists in the directory where spam.py is found, this is assumed to contain an already-“byte-compiled” version of the module spam. The modification time of the version of spam.py used to create spam.pyc is recorded in spam.pyc, and the .pyc file is ignored if these don’t match.

See the ref for more info. But some specific answers:

The contents of the spam.pyc file are platform independent, so a Python module directory can be shared by machines of different architectures.

It's not an executable; it's used internally by the compiler as an intermediate step.

In general, you don't make .pyc files by hand: the interpreter makes them automatically.