El mar., 19 may. 2020 a las 10:29, Guido van Rossum (<guido@python.org>) escribió:

On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 8:44 AM Sebastian Rittau <srittau@rittau.biz> wrote:

Am 19.05.20 um 16:34 schrieb Guido van Rossum:
> Can you please provide concrete code examples? I am not a data
> scientist and I don't know all the libraries you are interested in.
>
> Also, the buffer protocol is very low level, I'd worry that the code
> wouldn't be very safe in practice.
>
> What's wrong with the occasional cast() call or # type: ignore comment?

The lack of a buffer protocol is something that I came across multiple
times now while reviewing typeshed PRs, although I haven't worked with
the buffer protocol myself yet. But it seems to be a common problem that
we can't solve on the typeshed level. The best we could do is provide an
alias for Union[bytes, bytearray, memoryview, array.array] that we could
use whenever the stdlib accepts buffer protocol object. But in my
opinion it would be better to do it "right" and provide a buffer
protocol type that could be used for such third-party classes as well.

Of course it's possible to cast or # type: ignore whenever passing such
an object, but that's hardly convenient and defeats the type checks. The
caller must be sure that e.g. fcntl.ioctl() supports the buffer
interface and can't rely on type checks.

AFAIK mypy doesn't actually know anything about bytes except what's said about it in typeshed. So maybe we can just define a proper class representing the buffer protocol in an appropriate place (maybe stick it in types.pyi with an underscore name because it's not in the stdlib types.py) and ensure that bytes, bytearray etc. inherit from it? Would that kind of class hierarchy help?

Yes, that's the idea, but nobody so far has stepped up to actually do it. I would want it to be in typing(_extensions) with a public name so that third-party libraries can also use it.

A slightly troublesome aspect is that the "buffer protocol" is C-only and there are no Python methods that correspond to it. A standard Protocol therefore doesn't work; instead we should create an empty class that bytes and friends inherit from. I proposed this in https://github.com/python/typing/issues/593#issuecomment-440327001.