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On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 11:15, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
[SNIP]The fact that we have an undocumented PEP 302 based reimplementation
of imports squirrelled away in pkgutil to make pkgutil and runpy work
is sheer insanity (replacing *that* with importlib might actually be a
good first step towards full integration).It easily goes beyond runpy. You could ditch much of imp's C code (e.g. load_module()), you could write py_compile and compileall using importlib, you could rewrite zipimport, etc. Anything that touches import could be refactored to (a) use just Python code, and (b) reshare code so as to not re-invent the wheel constantly.
And taking it even farther, all of the blackbox aspects of import go away. For instance, the implicit, hidden importers for built-in modules, frozen modules, extensions, and source could actually be set on sys.path\_hooks. The Meta path importer that handles sys.path could actually exist on sys.meta\_path.