Known limitations of the current implementation:
- documentation changes are incomplete
- there's a reference leak I haven't tracked down yet
The leak is most visible by running:
./python -m test -R3:3 test_importlib
However, you can also see it by running:
./python -X showrefcount
Importing the array or _testmultiphase modules, and
then deleting them from both sys.modules and the local
namespace shows significant increases in the total
number of active references each cycle. By contrast,
with _testcapi (which continues to use single-phase
initialisation) the global refcounts stabilise after
a couple of cycles.
module loaders.
Due to the fact that the call signatures for extension modules and
built-in modules does not allow for the specifying of what module to
initialize and that on Windows all extension modules are built-in
modules, work to clean up built-in and extension module initialization
will have to wait until Python 3.5. Because of this the semantics of
exec_module() would be incorrect, so removing the methods for now is
the best option; load_module() is still used as a fallback by
importlib and so this won't affect semantics.
Benjamin Peterson
Nick Coghlan
Eric Snow
Brett Cannon