I’ve been exploring TensorFlow internals in the past couple of weeks. Doing that required me to run some python scripts with a debug version of TensorFlow, set some breakpoints, examine some values, modify the script, repeat. You know, general sleuthing. TensorFlow core functionality is written in C++. The python package is a wrapper around C++ code + libraries at the python layer. The way that python interacts with TensorFlow core is by loading a shared object.