On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 8:10 AM Matt del Valle <matthewgdv@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't really have any knowledge of the Python interpreter's internals so I'm afraid any suggestions of mine on implementation details are going to be shots in the dark.
That said, my intuition tells me that something similar to the proxy object pattern currently used by many lazy import implementations maybe could work here, with the interpreter creating some sort of 'lazy import proxy' object on this line rather than performing the import:
from .extremely_expensive_module lazy import SomeClass
And then when it actually is used in any way as part of any code that isn't another lazy import statement (normal import statements and even assignment statements that don't modify the object or attempt to access its attributes would count) it actually gets fully imported at that point in time, and all references anywhere in the application to this 'lazy import proxy' are swapped to point at the real object.
You could have it so that if you tried to lazy import an object that is actually already a 'lazy import proxy' you would just get a reference to it rather than provisioning a new one. This would allow you to 'chain' lazy import statements across several modules to defer the import until the object (be it a module or a class) is actually used.
Seems fairly reasonable, I think. I'm still not convinced of the real value of this, given that you can always just import something inside a function or somesuch, and repeated imports are always going to be cheap; it's going to come down to use-cases. But if lazy imports were to be a thing, the semantics you describe aren't bad. ChrisA