[Python-Dev] PEP 428: stat caching undesirable? (original) (raw)

Charles-François Natali cf.natali at gmail.com
Wed May 1 14:50:07 CEST 2013

3) Leave it up to performance critical code, such as the import machinery, or walkdirs that Nick mentioned, to do their own caching, and simplify the filepath API for the simple case.

But one can still make life easier for code like that, by adding isfile() and friends on the stat result object as I suggested.

+1 from me. PEP 428 goes in the right direction with a distinction between "pure" path and "concrete" path. Pure path support syntactic operations, whereas I would expect concrete paths to actually access the file system. Having a method like restat() is a hint that something's wrong, I'm convinced this will bite some people.

I'm also be in favor of having a wrapper class around os.stat() result which would export utility methods such as is_file()/is_directory() and owner/group, etc attributes.

That way, the default behavior would be correct, and this helper class would make it easier for users like walkdir() to implement their own caching.

As an added benefit, this would make path objects actually immutable, which is always a good thing (simpler, and you get thread-safety for free).

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