How does PyCharm run Python scripts?

Question

A few days ago I was getting issues trying to run Tensorflow models with CUDA enabled and for a long time I couldn't resolve in large because PyCharm displayed completely unhelpful message

"Process finished with exit code -1073740791 (0xC0000409)"

I then launched VSCode and ran the same code in PowerShell and got a nice and extensive error message which allowed me to resolve all issues within half hour (same when running in cmd too). Other outputs are also somewhat different. So this makes me assume that PyCharm runs scripts in some type of its own terminal rather than relying on cmd or PowerShell.

Does anyone know if this is the case?

Answer 1

So this makes me assume that PyCharm runs scripts in some type of its own terminal rather than relying on cmd or PowerShell.

Not necessarily. Just because PyCharm displays a custom error message doesn't mean it doesn't rely on cmd. Here's a Python script that simulates what PyCharm does using the cmd:

# So we can launch a process from Python
import subprocess as sp

# Launches a Python process for a specific file
# `stdout=sp.DEVNULL` suppresses the process output
# so that's why there is no detailed error message
child = sp.Popen(["python", "file.py"], stdout=sp.DEVNULL)

# Start the Python process
process = child.communicate()[0]

# Returns the process exit code
# If the process finishes without errors, it'll return 0
# otherwise, it'll return a "random" value
exit_code = process.returncode

# Displays to stdout the completely unhelpful message
print(f"Process finished with exit code {exit_code} ({hex(exit_code)})")

Either way, here's what PyCharm says :

Initially, the terminal emulator runs with your default system shell, but it supports many other shells such as Windows PowerShell, Command Prompt cmd.exe, sh, bash, zsh, csh, and so on.