RFC: startup time - again

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Matt Nordhoff wrote:
...

>> There are some other, mostly minor, things.
> 
> That's no longer the case. Nowadays, they override the __import__
> function, so there's no special syntax whatsoever, and everything gets
> imported lazily (except for half a dozen modules on an ignore list).
> 
> (Look at mercurial/demandimport.py [1] in the source tree if you're
> curious. It replaced the old mercurial/demandload.py in version 0.9.4.)
> 
Interesting, as that tends to break 3rd party code. Which is why we
chose not to do it. Especially optional imports like:

try:
  import foo
except ImportError:
  # use different functionality

I would guess they did it because some of the standard library is also
pretty bad about import ordering. Witness our workaround for 'copy'
called 'inspect_for_copy'. Where we create a custom 'inspect' module for
the 'copy' module because it doesn't use 90% of the functionality that
gets loaded.

John
=:->
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