According to TheRegister.com, Python’s PEP 810 “Explicit lazy imports” was approved on November 3 after being proposed by Steering Council Member Pablo Salgadoon on October 3. The enhancement will make lazy imports an opt-in feature built directly into Python itself, addressing long-standing startup time issues. The proposal generated over 450 comments during its month-long review period, including debates about naming conventions. This follows the rejection of PEP 690, which failed partly because it made lazy imports the default rather than optional. Barry Warsaw of the Python Steering Council acknowledged this has been “a feature so many in the Python community have wanted for so long.” The implementation strikes a balance between innovation and backward compatibility that previous attempts missed.
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Why this actually matters
Here’s the thing about Python imports – they’re both incredibly powerful and incredibly annoying. You write a simple script, import a few libraries, and suddenly you’re waiting seconds for modules to load that you might not even use. Basically, every import statement triggers immediate loading, even if that code never gets called. Think about command-line tools that import heavy libraries just to show a help message – it’s wasteful. And developers have been complaining about this for years. So why did it take so long to fix something that seems so obvious?
The long road to lazy
This isn’t Python’s first attempt at lazy imports. PEP 690 got rejected, and the reasons are actually pretty revealing. That proposal wanted to make lazy imports the default behavior, which sounds great until you realize how much existing code it might break. Backward compatibility is sacred in the Python world. Meanwhile, developers weren’t just sitting around waiting – organizations were creating their own workarounds, some even forking CPython to get the performance they needed. The community was essentially solving the same problem in dozens of different ways, which is exactly the kind of fragmentation Python tries to avoid. So PEP 810’s opt-in approach is actually pretty clever – it gives performance benefits without forcing anyone to change their existing code.
What comes next
Now the real work begins. The PEP is approved, but implementation details still need to be worked out. We’re probably looking at Python 3.13 or later before this actually lands in a stable release. And there will be questions – how do you opt in? Will there be performance trade-offs? What about edge cases with dynamic imports? But the bigger picture here is significant. Python’s been facing increasing competition from languages with faster startup times, especially for command-line tools and microservices. This move shows the language is still evolving to meet modern development needs. It’s not revolutionary, but it’s practical – and sometimes that’s exactly what a mature language needs.
