What are Python disassemblers used for?

Question

I've noticed there is a significant degree of interest in Python disassemblers such as the dis module.

However it is surprisingly difficult to find what these disassemblers are generally used for in industry/academia. Outside of satisfying curiosity (a perfectly legitimate endeavour!) or writing Python implementations do they have any common uses?

Answer 1

The Python bytecode disassembler has no common use aside from curiosity or investigating details of the Python implementations. It's similar to how most C programmers never need to look at assembler, even though they are compiling C code to assembler and using debuggers like gdb. In Python's case, pdb (but also tracebacks and so on) all nicely hide the bytecode from the regular programmer's eyes.

Of course, it can be fun to learn about it anyway. It's one way of getting a good idea about how Python really works :-)