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What happens behind execution of an import statement?

What happens behind execution of an import statement?

Shivashis Padhi

August 16, 2020
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  1. Who am I? - data/software at Grofers - tinker with

    earth observation data - past GSoC with the PSF - love FOSS. worked on felicette, MSS
  2. Packages ‣ directories? not necessarily ‣ special types of modules

    ‣ the __path__ attribute ‣ What are subpackages?
  3. Types of packages supported by default ‣ built-in modules ‣

    frozen modules ‣ path entries in $PATH, and $PYTHONPATH
  4. sys.modules ‣ A dictionary to map module names to modules

    which are ‘already loaded’. ‣ Lives in the global namespace of sys
  5. importlib ‣ provide the implementation of the import statement ‣

    expose parts of the import system for programmatic usage
  6. Common use-cases of importlib ‣ Programmatically loading a module ‣

    Reloading a module in run-time ‣ Base classes for finders and loaders (to be used with import hooks)
  7. Finders ‣ find the module ‣ return a spec object

    ‣ Finder object must have a find_spec method defined.
  8. Finders - examples ‣ locate built-in modules - BuiltinImporter ‣

    locate frozen modules - FrozenImporter ‣ import path - imagine $PATH and $PYTHONPATH - PathFinder
  9. Finders - function ‣ If a finder is capable of

    handling import, it returns a module spec. ‣ module spec contains module’s metadata i.e path, name, etc. The import machinery uses this spec to load modules later.
  10. What are import hooks? ‣ Inserting custom finders and loaders

    into the import mechanism ‣ Dependency injection?
  11. Loaders After spec object is returned from a finder, loaders

    are used to execute the module and store its reference in sys.modules
  12. Tasks of loaders ‣ load from source/byte-code ‣ compile source

    ‣ execute the module and store reference in sys.modules[spec.name]
  13. What else can you do with import hooks? ‣ full

    control after what happens after import x ‣ importing from ftp, https, authorization checks. ‣ importing from a variety of storage, not just .py/.pyc