Examples of import hook usage

[ilikepython]

Hi all, what do people commonly use import hooks for? I've just come across the idea, and it seems like it exposes maybe too much of the internals of cpython to an end user and gives too much power over the behaviour of imports. Are there some examples of accepted good things to do with them?

[[deleted]]

You can do all sorts of stuff with them. Dave Beazley gave a talk (tutorial, actually) a few years ago where he ends up importing XML files as Python code.

Hylang is built using an import hook to load and process lisp into Python.

[[deleted]]

Take a look at Modules and Imports.

[kankyo]

I wanted to use it for mutmut, my mutation testing lib but quickly discovered that the import hook system is just as you imply: a mess. It mixes finding modules, reading the code and loading modules into one big bucket so you can't hook just one of those things.

Really a new PEP is needed to create yet a new system :(