From ncoghlan at gmail.com  Wed Aug  5 13:29:44 2015
From: ncoghlan at gmail.com (Nick Coghlan)
Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2015 21:29:44 +1000
Subject: [Import-SIG] On singleton modules, heap types,
	and subinterpreters
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On 30 July 2015 at 18:13, Petr Viktorin <encukou at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 5:30 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> That way, we could walk the type hierarchy to find the defining class
>> on first look up, and then cache it on the derived type when done.
>
> It sounds classes with index-based __typeslots__ would be incompatible
> for multiple inheritance.

__slots__ already mess with multiple inheritance, so having
__typeslots__ also mess with that wouldn't be a new limitation.

However, I figured out a worse problem with the idea - it doesn't
actually solve the problem we're trying to solve, which is that we
ideally want this messy scenario to "do the right thing" even after
being Cythonised:

base.py:
    class Example:
        def __str__(self):
            return "Example str from {}.format(__name__)

derived.py:
    import base
    class Example(base.Example):
        def __repr__(self):
            return "Example repr from {}.format(__name__)
        def __str__(self):
            return super().__str__()

    assert repr(Example()) == "Example repr from derived"
    assert str(Example()) == "Example str from base"

On the other hand, zero-argument super, which is essentially the same
problem we have here when it comes to walking the MRO from the right
starting point, only at the Python level, may point us towards a
possible solution: conceiving of this problem in terms of closures and
cell dereferencing, with the cell reference stored on the method
implementations themselves, rather than accessing it indirectly
through the type object.

Under that model, we'd be back to my "wrapped slot" idea, but rather
than using an active module stack, we'd instead add a "PyObject
*defclass" parameter to the signature of the *implementation* for
wrapped slots, and implement the method wrapper at type definition
time as a closure that references the defining __class__. Cython
presumably needs a capability along these lines to handle
zero-argument super reliably anyway.

Such methods would take a slight speed hit from always having to
dereference the cell at method call time, but if we combined this with
the __typeslots__ idea, they'd also gain a type-definition-scoped fast
access storage area.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia