Working to Make Python Lazy (iscinumpy.dev)

> This pattern, for example, can’t be lazy: try: import numpy; except ModuleNotFoundError: ...

Wait, that seems bad. These kinds of modules (especially numba) are often exactly the ones that you want to delay importing. Why not provide a way to check the existence at import time? How are you supposed to handle nonexistence in that case?

  import importlib.util

  if importlib.util.find_spec("numpy") is None:
  ... # whatever you wanted to do if numpy is missing

  lazy import numpy

I've got my reservations about lazy imports, but scipy in particular is such a memory hog, I've increasingly been vendoring smaller utilities out of it. Good lazy imports would be a big help.

This feature seems really valuable for commandline tools! However this paragraph gave me pause:

> Currently, disabling lazy imports disabled the syntax keyword, which means that you can’t use it for circular imports, type checking, etc.

Imo this is a good thing, laziness shouldn't be semantically important. The ability to force disable laziness while maintaining semantics is important for linting and testing, and more often than not, circular imports are a sign of bad code structure.

Good feature but god I hate there’s a whole new keyword for a minor modification on an existing concept. Very unnecessary.

This seems like an ugly hack. We really need a way to snapshot a python program after its imports have been loaded, similar to temacs/emacs that's been around for decades, or a similar thing that exists in gforth. Emacs's old unexec scheme became unmaintainable but maybe there are still good alternate ways to do it.

Is there a language with a hybrid laziness approach? similar to "do work only if needed" but if you have ressources, do work most likely to be needed, like lazy anticipating?

Or just use C++. The Python ecosystem is just bloat, blogs and tools.