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Comment by arjvik | Hacker News Reader

What other use cases did the community come up with?

Dependency injections, foreign-language bridges, data validation and parsing, etc.

But thanks to how we can introspect annotations, we could have a specialized syntax for types that would be also usable for those things, while the other way around would be harder.

So it's nice we went the type hints road, because you can now define types, and yet have wonderful libs like pydantic, fastapi, typer, taichi and so on.

Cool, any examples of libraries that use it for dependency injection or FFI or validation?

For FFI, there is a pure python mode in cython:

  https://cython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/src/tutorial/external.html

django-ninja and fastapi does dep injection, parsing and validation based on annotations.

taichi does ffi with their own dsl, cython with c.

I you haven't tried pydantic or sister projects (django-ninja, fastapi and typer), this is a good place to start. They bring a breath of fresh air and are quite fun to use.

Specifically it's the underlying pydantic that does validation based on annotations

https://pydantic-docs.helpmanual.io/

Indeed.

The dep injection is fastapi and typer code though, and quite tied to it. So it's worth mentioning that somebody is attempting (quite successfully from the look of it) to create a generic lib of dep injection using annotation named DI, inspired by those libs: https://github.com/adriangb/di

I always find it very funny that fastapi has that name when it relies on pydantic that is one of the slowest libraries in that space :D

Dependency-injector uses it for exactly this purpose

    @inject
    def main(service: Service = Provide[Container.service]) -> None:
        ...

FastAPI also does a similar sort of trick, for DI and also request parsing.

https://python-dependency-injector.ets-labs.org/introduction...

It's not one of those that you listed, but the @dataclass decorator uses type hints to auto-generate classes and class constructors (__init__ method) for you.

An example:

    @dataclass
    class HackerNewsPost:
        title: str
        author: str
        votes: int = 0

This will generate a constructor that looks like this:

    def __init__(title: str, author: str, votes: int = 0):
        self.title = title
        self.author = author
        self.votes = votes

This is pretty useful, writing __init__ boilerplate has been a common thing in my experience using Python, and it makes code more compact and readable.

It can do some other things too!

https://docs.python.org/3/library/dataclasses.html

Pydantic typing differs from mypy typing. Optional[T] means something different under the two.

I designed typedload before pydantic was a thing and I made it with mypy in mind already, and with the idea of using the standard library, not defining my own dataclass.

Unfortunately mypy has a limitation so you can't make a function that takes Type[T] and returns T. You can define it but it won't work for all types. There is still discussion on how to provide this feature.

Yeah this ones is really annoying with default values.

I used them at runtime to define the types for my (absolutely stupid) library that takes a Python function and replaces its contents with a C call.

You define a Python function interface but populate it with a string of C code.

Wait, so like this?

    def add(x: int, y: int) -> int:
        """ // c code
            int x, y
            return x + y
        """

And it compiles it and turns it into a C extension?

That's...horrifying yet amazing.

That might be a worthwhile addition to the suggestion at https://github.com/faster-cpython/ideas/issues/453

Combined with the cog (https://nedbatchelder.com/code/cog) to have the c declaration in a proper separate c file, but included in the docstring, you could have the best of both worlds.

That's a neat hack!

There's a library for simulating the Excel calculation engine in Python. It uses annotations to hint functions, but according to Excel's type system, not Python's. Then at runtime, those hints are used to do conversion and promotion based on how Excel does it, so you can do e.g. the equivalent of "1" + 1 and get 2.

It's either xlcalculator or pycel, one of the two. I forgot which one does it that way.

Looks like it's xlcalculator:

https://github.com/bradbase/xlcalculator#addingregistering-e...

Things like pydantic and fastapi where the type annotations are used for run time argument validation and interface generation.

Does this still work with Python 3.10 changes removing runtime evaluation of type annotations? I seem to recall this screwed me when I was writing something for runtime usage of types.

There was a heated debate because it broke things at the time, but now it works, yes.

we still don't know what's going to happen with type hints in future though, but I'm sure things won't break as they might have broken if they changed the default behaviour

Oh it looks like they actually pushed back the PEP 563 changes..

From this thread [0] it does not look open and shut that it will work once these changes go into effect.

[0]: https://github.com/pydantic/pydantic/issues/2678

They postponed that change.

It remained enabled with a future and while it kinda works, it doesn't work in all cases. Non top level definitions can never be retrieved basically.

Creating argument parsers for CLIs: https://pypi.org/project/argtyped/

I've seen similar (in-house) to generate HTML forms also.

I've created strawberry graphql, it uses type hints to generate GraphQL schemas

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