[Python-Dev] Rethinking intern() and its data structure (original) (raw)

P.J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Fri Apr 10 21:05:17 CEST 2009

At 06:52 PM 4/10/2009 +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:

This problem (slow application startup times due to too many imports at startup, which can in turn can be due to top level imports for library or framework functionality that a given application doesn't actually use) is actually the main reason I sometimes wish for a nice, solid lazy module import mechanism that manages to avoid the potential deadlock problems created by using import statements inside functions.

Have you tried http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Importing ? Or more specifically, http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/Importing#lazy-imports ?

It does of course use the import lock, but as long as your top-level module code doesn't acquire locks (directly or indirectly), it shouldn't be possible to deadlock. (Or more precisely, to add any new deadlocks that you didn't already have.)

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