Python now supports checking bytecode cache up-to-dateness with a hash of the
source contents rather than volatile source metadata. See the PEP for details.
While a fairly straightforward idea, quite a lot of code had to be modified due
to the pervasiveness of pyc implementation details in the codebase. Changes in
this commit include:
- The core changes to importlib to understand how to read, validate, and
regenerate hash-based pycs.
- Support for generating hash-based pycs in py_compile and compileall.
- Modifications to our siphash implementation to support passing a custom
key. We then expose it to importlib through _imp.
- Updates to all places in the interpreter, standard library, and tests that
manually generate or parse pyc files to grok the new format.
- Support in the interpreter command line code for long options like
--check-hash-based-pycs.
- Tests and documentation for all of the above.
Previously AttributeError was raised, but that's not very reflective of the fact that the requested module can't be found since the specified parent isn't actually a package.
modules can't be lazily loaded.
Thanks to Python 3.6 allowing for types.ModuleType to have its
__class__ mutated, the restriction can be lifted by calling
create_module() on the wrapped loader.
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.
The concept of .pyo files no longer exists. Now .pyc files have an
optional `opt-` tag which specifies if any extra optimizations beyond
the peepholer were applied.
importlib.abc.Loader.exec_module() is also defined.
Before this change, create_module() was optional **and** could return
None to trigger default semantics. This change now reduces the
options for choosing default semantics to one and in the most
backporting-friendly way (define create_module() to return None).