[Python-Dev] Remove typing from the stdlib

[Raymond Hettinger]

> On Nov 3, 2017, at 9:15 AM, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 2017-11-03 15:36 GMT+01:00 Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>:
>> Maybe we should remove typing from the stdlib?
>> https://github.com/python/typing/issues/495
> 
> I'm strongly in favor on such move.
> 
> My experience with asyncio in the stdlib is that users expect changes
> faster than the very slow release process of the stdlib (a release
> every 18 months in average).
> 
> I saw many PEPs and discussion on the typing design (meta-classes vs
> regular classes), as if the typing is not stable enough to be part of
> the stdlib.
> 
> The typing module is not used yet in the stdlib, so there is no
> technically reason to keep typing part of the stdlib. IMHO it's
> perfectly fine to keep typing and annotations out of the stdlib, since
> the venv & pip tooling is now rock solid ;-)

I concur with Victor on every point.  In particular, many of the good reasons that typeshed is external to the standard library will also apply to typing.py.  

It would also be nice to not have typing.py vary with each version of CPython's release cycle.  Not only would typing benefit from more frequent updates, it would be nice to have updates that aren't tied to a specific version of CPython -- that would help folks who have to maintain code that works across multiple CPython versions (i.e. the same benefit that we get by always installing the most up-to-date versions of requests, typeshed, jinja2, etc).

Already, we've have updates to typing.py in the point releases of Python because those updates were considered so useful and important.


Raymond