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.
Serhiy Storchaka
Nick Coghlan
Larry Hastings
Brett Cannon