PEP 690: Lazy Imports

[gpshead (Gregory P. Smith)]

@malemburg

Instead of making this a global option, I think making it easy to use lazy imports on a case by case basis would be better, something like:

lazy import re

E.g. let’s say one of the functions in your module uses the re module, but all others don’t. In this case, a lazy import of the re module at the top of the module would make sense.

I don’t find this useful. Code already has a way to do this today: import re in the code right next to where it is used instead of as a top level import. Exact same effect.

The startup time benefit of lazy imports only comes from enabling them broadly, not by requiring all code in your application’s entire transitive dependencies to be modified to declare most of their imports as lazy. We do not want people to need to learn yet another import syntax to replace what we already have.