# Understanding PyTorch operators

**URL:** <https://discuss.pytorch.org/t/understanding-pytorch-operators/86785>\
**Category:** jit\
**Created:** [June 24, 2020, 9:54pm UTC](https://discuss.pytorch.org/t/understanding-pytorch-operators/86785 "2020-06-24T21:54:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![flynntax](https://discuss.pytorch.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/3ec8ea/32.png) [@flynntax](https://discuss.pytorch.org/u/flynntax)\
**Post date:** [June 24, 2020, 9:54pm UTC](https://discuss.pytorch.org/t/understanding-pytorch-operators/86785/1 "2020-06-24T21:54:31Z")

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Mainly looking for information about aten and prim operators. Is there documentation to look at all of them? What is the total number of them? It seems there’s a C API to use them directly but is there a Python API as well? Basically I want to be able to build a torchscript graph node by node with specific operators.

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**Author:** ![Michael\_Suo](https://discuss.pytorch.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/7993a0/32.png) [@Michael\_Suo](https://discuss.pytorch.org/u/Michael_Suo)\
**Post date:** [June 24, 2020, 11:24pm UTC](https://discuss.pytorch.org/t/understanding-pytorch-operators/86785/2 "2020-06-24T23:24:33Z")

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The aten and prim namespaces are considered internal details so we don’t really have user-facing documentation explaining them. The closest (for aten) is maybe [https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/master/aten/src/ATen/native/README.md](https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/master/aten/src/ATen/native/README.md).

There is are Python bindings to the PyTorch IR in ([https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/master/torch/csrc/jit/python/python\_ir.cpp](https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/master/torch/csrc/jit/python/python_ir.cpp)), but once again they are considered internal.