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 _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
