What's all this fuss about Python and CPython (Jython,IronPython), I don't get it:
python.org mentions that CPython is:
The "traditional" implementation of Python (nicknamed CPython)
yet another Stack Overflow question mentions that:
CPython is the default byte-code interpreter of Python, which is written in C.
Honestly I don't get what both of those explanations practically mean but what I thought was that, if I use CPython does that mean when I run a sample python code, it compiles it to C language and then executes it as if it were C code
So what exactly is CPython and how does it differ when compared with python and should I probably use CPython over Python and if so what are its advantages?
10 Answers
So what is CPython?
CPython is the original Python implementation. It is the implementation you download from Python.org. People call it CPython to distinguish it from other, later, Python implementations, and to distinguish the implementation of the language engine from the Python programming language itself.
The latter part is where your confusion comes from; you need to keep Python-the-language separate from whatever runs the Python code.
CPython happens to be implemented in C. That is just an implementation detail, really. CPython compiles your Python code into bytecode (transparently) and interprets that bytecode in a evaluation loop.
CPython is also the first to implement new features; Python-the-language development uses CPython as the base; other implementations follow.
