alexeev-prog

Many of us have opened a hex editor to analyze a file or to learn reverse engineering. One day I came across an interesting article on color-coding bytes. Without much hesitation, I decided to write an article — not just a tutorial on highlighting bytes, but a deep dive into the inner workings of a minimal hex editor. We'll explore how bytes become a hex dump, what approaches to highlighting exist, and why this matters for analyzing binary data.

During software development, we often face a choice between a language's convenience and its performance. Python has gained popularity due to its simplicity and elegance, but when it comes to low-level operations or tasks requiring high performance and speed, C comes to the rescue.

We will be focusing specifically on integrating extensions at build time, not just loading libraries via ctypes.

In this article, I want to discuss how to integrate C extensions using the Python.h library. I will also explain how to create your own Python library with C extensions. We will explore how Python works internally — for example, we'll recall that everything is an object. I will use Poetry as my environment manager.

Everything will be demonstrated using my small library for various algorithms and computations. At the end, I will conduct an analysis of pure Python algorithms, our library, and pure C algorithms: execution speed, distributability, pros and cons, and code volume.

Without further ado, let's begin!

On June 5, 2025, PEP-0734 was accepted. Judging by the information on the official website, it is a continuation of PEP-0554. This PEP proposes adding a new interpreters module to support checking, creating, and running code in multiple interpreters within the current process. And going further, it is a continuation of PEP-0684, which proposes one GIL per interpreter.

Several full-fledged interpreters working side by side. What are the advantages?

Good day, ladies and gentlemen! Sometimes some people get the urge to engage in outright indecency in programming — things that don't bring direct practical benefit but help to have fun. And I am no exception. In this article, I want to tell you about lifehacks, tricks (magical and not so magical), and algorithms in the C language!