I’m currently looking around to find what’s allow and what’s not in GAE.
Using the Google’s Developers website, I found that _socket C Libraries and the socket module are not allowed on GAE.
How did they disable these modules? Did they performed a complete rebuild of the python interpreter or did they developed their own (like pypy)?
You don’t really need to rebuild the whole python interpeter just to disable modules, you can (for example) delete the libraries or (as AppEngine did) or have a import hook that will check for loaded module and have a whitelist of modules which are allowed to be loaded.