On Wed, 13 Jan 2021, 12:35 pm Larry Hastings, <larry@hastings.org> wrote:

On 1/12/21 5:28 PM, Brett Cannon wrote:

The other thing to keep in mind is we are talking about every module, class, and function getting 64 bytes ... which I bet isn't that much.

Actually it's only every module and class. Functions don't have this problem because they've always stored __annotations__ internally--meaning, peeking in their __dict__ doesn't work, and they don't support inheritance anyway. So the number is even smaller than that.

If we can just make __annotations__ default to an empty dict on classes and modules, and not worry about the memory consumption, that goes a long way to cleaning up the semantics.

Could you get the best of both worlds by making __annotations__ an auto-populating descriptor on "type", the way it is on functions?

Continue to add a non-empty annotations dict to the class dict eagerly, but only add the empty dict when "cls.__annotations__" is accessed.

Then your co_annotations PEP would only be changing the way the non-empty case was handled, rather than introducing the descriptor in the first place.

Cheers,

Nick.