Artem Golubin: On code isolation in Python

I started learning Python in 2009, and I had a pretty challenging task and somewhat unusual use of Python. I was working on a desktop application that used PyQT for GUI and Python as the main language.

To hide the code, I embedded Python interpreter into a standalone Windows executable. There are a lot of solutions to do so (e.g. pyinstaller, pyexe), and they all work similarly. They compile your Python scripts to bytecode files and bundle them with an interpreter into an executable. Compiling scripts down to bytecode makes it harder for people with bad intentions to get the source code and crack or hack your software. Bytecode has to be extracted from the executable and decompiled. It can also produce obfuscated code that is much harder to understand.

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