The ast module itself is in Python, but it imports the _ast module which is an extension module. This actually isn't that big of a deal, though, as the entire AST is defined in a DSL (see https://cpython-devguide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/compiler.h... for some details), so you just have to write some code to generate _ast in Python instead of C (which PyPy may have already done).