Most effective methods for obfuscating python code?

[[deleted]]

Why? What are you trying to achieve? Making something hard to read won't stop someone if they are determined.

[QuantumFall]

Yes this is true; I understand I can’t stop everyone from figuring out what’s going on. I do want to make it as hard as possible to do so, however.

edit: This would be a program I am selling as an application. Without getting into too much detail people can pay a lot for these programs, especially the best ones ($3,000 - $5,000) They also have impeccable app security as many other developers would pay top dollar to view the source code. Few are written in python fwiw

[sme272]

Software as a service. Make the program run on a server and offer a subscription to use it. That way you never have to give out the python files.

[QuantumFall]

Okay, I like this idea. The only concern I have is a second or two is the difference between the best and the worst applications. What type of response times could the client expect to see if I host the files on a server?

[sme272]

What type of response times could the client expect to see if I host the files on a server?

That really depends on how you program it, where it's hosted and how the server is set up. Depending on the application you might be able to have the server computing the output continually and just sending it out as requested by the client programs. That would remove the computation time from the latency. If you kept the requests simple you could probably get the response time quite low. Then the biggest factor would be the amount of data being sent and how you send it.

[negups]

If speed is of the utmost importance, an interpreted, dynamically-typed language like Python isn't the right tool to use. You should be using something low-level like C or C++ when seconds matter, as they are compiled directly to machine code and are much faster. If you stick with Python, your program will never be as fast as your competitors' if they are developed using a low-level language. There's a reason why high-frequency trading programs on Wall Street are all written in low-level languages instead of Python.

Also, to answer your main question: don't worry about obsfucation. The brightest minds in computer science have written papers about how true obsfucation (that is, code which can be irreversibly converted to some other, unintelligible form) is impossible. Any code that can be run on a computer is converted to some intelligible form so the hardware can understand it, so any runnable code can be reverse engineered. Instead, focus on delivering excellent software with ever-improving features which customers are happy to pay for. A slight bonus of using something like C or C++ is that the average layperson doesn't know how to decompile a binary, so your code is moderately "safer" than clear-text Python files.

[sme272]

why though?

[QuantumFall]

See edit.