[Python-Dev] Dynamic module namspaces

[Johan Dahlin]

In an effort to reduce the memory usage used by GTK+ applications 
written in python I've recently added a feature that allows attributes 
to be lazy loaded in a module namespace. The gtk python module contains 
quite a few attributes (around 850) of which many are classes or 
interfaces (150+)

The changes to PyGTK I had to make can not be considered anything but a 
hack; I had to put a subclass of a ModuleType in sys.modules and 
override __getattribute__ to be able to get old code which accessed 
gtk.__dict__ directly to still work (PyModule_GetDict requires that).
However, even if I didn't have to use __getattribute__ overriding 
sys.modules is rather unpleasent and I'm afraid it'll cause problems in 
the future.

My point is that I consider this to be a valid use case, the amount of 
saved memory is significan, and I could not find another way of doing it 
and still keep the gtk interface (import gtk; gtk.Button) to still be 
backwards compatible.

What I want to ask, is it possible to have a sanctioned way to implement 
a dynamic module/namespace in python?

For instance, it could be implemented to allow you to replace the 
__dict__ attribute in a module with a user provided object which 
implements the dictionary protocol.

Johan