# bloomberg/pystack

🔍 🐍 Like pstack but for Python!

Repository: https://github.com/bloomberg/pystack
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/pystack
Homepage: https://bloomberg.github.io/pystack
Language: C++
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Topics: coredump, python, python3, stacktrace, troubleshooting
Last push: 2026-08-25T21:43:42+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 88/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 72, longevity 93
- inputs: {"age_days": 1315, "days_push": 8, "days_rel": 26, "gap_med": 94.0, "n_releases_24m": 7}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1211, forks 72 (observed 2026-08-28T04:04:00.184395+00:00)

## What it is
PyStack is a CLI tool that inspects and prints the stack frames of a running Python process or a Python core dump, including GIL state, garbage collection status, native frames, and local variables. It works safely on live processes and tolerates stripped binaries and memory corruption.

## Use cases
- debug a hanging python process
- get stack trace from python core dump
- find out what a slow python process is doing
- inspect python threads without stopping the process
- debug python crash with memory corruption
- report thread stacks when pytest tests get stuck

## When to choose
- you need stack traces from running Python processes or core dumps on Linux
- the interpreter binary is stripped, optimized, or lacks debug info
- you need native (C/C++) and Python frames interleaved
- you want fast core dump analysis compared to GDB

## When to avoid
- you need a cross-platform debugger on macOS or Windows
- you need an interactive stepping debugger rather than a snapshot
- you need to modify or control the target process

## Facets
- artifact type: cli-tool
- maturity: active
- function: developer-tools, tracing, testing
- domain: developer-tools
- platform: python, cli
- tags: stack-trace, core-dump, debugging, cpython-internals, pytest-plugin, python, linux

## Member repositories
- bloomberg/pystack (main) score 88

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:00.184395+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T06:18:03.444390+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/bloomberg/pystack (fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:00.184395+00:00, sha 80dd245db309)
  - homepage: https://bloomberg.github.io/pystack (fetched 2026-08-29T12:25:54.928854+00:00, sha 513cc0d3acfe)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.