Skip to content

Get rid of "wrapper_descriptors" and "method-wrapper"s #714

Open

Description

@markshannon
>>> type(int.__add__)
<class 'wrapper_descriptor'>
>>> type((0).__add__)
<class 'method-wrapper'>

Compare to

>>> type(int.bit_count)
<class 'method_descriptor'>
>>> type((0).bit_count)
<class 'builtin_function_or_method'>

Wrapper descriptors and method wrappers are artifacts of the implementation. Ideally they would not exist and we would get

>>> type(int.__add__)
<class 'method_descriptor'>
>>> type((0).__add__)
<class 'builtin_function_or_method'>

We would like these wrapper descriptors to be method descriptors in order to simplify optimization and generally reduce the number of special cases.

There are two obstacles to doing this.

  1. These two types are exposed in the types module, so we cannot remove them altogether. Maybe we could make types.WrapperDescriptorType a subclass of method descriptor to simplify things, or just make types.WrapperDescriptorType an alias?
  2. There is no way to efficiently wrap a binary C function in a method descriptor. This is easily fixed by adding a METH_OO flag for functions taking two arguments enabling effective specialization of these functions

Activity

  1. JelleZijlstra commented on Jan 5, 2025

    @JelleZijlstra
    Contributor

    These two types are exposed in the types module, so we cannot remove them altogether. Maybe we could make types.WrapperDescriptorType a subclass of method descriptor to simplify things, or just make types.WrapperDescriptorType an alias?

    There's precedent for this: types.LambdaType is an alias for types.FunctionType, and types.BuiltinMethodType and types.BuiltinFunctionType both point to builtin_function_or_method (I think they were different in Python 2?). If your proposal in this issue works out, I think aliasing the names in types.py would be a good solution.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions