Wandering Thoughts archives

The consequences of importing a module twice

Back when I wrote about Python's relative import problem, I mentioned that only actually importing a module once can be important due to Python's semantics. Today I feel like discussing what these are and how much they can matter.

The straightforward thing that goes wrong if you manage to import a module twice (under two different names) is that any code in the module gets run twice, not once. Modules that run active code on import assume that this code is only going to be run once; running it again may result in various sorts of malfunctions.

At one level, modules that run code on import are relatively rare because people understand it's bad form for a simple import to have big side effects. At another level, various frameworks like Django effectively run code on module import in order to handle things like setting up models and view forms and so on; it's just that this code isn't directly visible in your module because it's hiding in framework metaclasses. But this issue is a signpost to the really big thing: function and class definitions are executable statements that are run at import time. The net effect is that when you import a module a second time the new import has a completely distinct set of functions, classes, exceptions, sentinel objects, and so on. They look identical to the versions from the first import but as far as Python is concerned they are completely distinct; fred.MyCls is not the same thing as mymod.fred.MyCls.

(This is the same effect that you get when you use reload() on a module.)

However, my guess is that this generally won't matter. Most Python code uses duck typing and the two distinct classes are identical as far as that goes. Use of things like specific exceptions, sentinel values, and imported classes is probably going to be confined to the modules that directly imported the dual-imported module and thus mostly hidden from the outside world (for example, it's usually considered bad manners to leak exceptions from a module that you imported into the outside world). In many cases even the objects from the imported module are going to be significantly confined to the importing module.

(One potentially bad thing is that if the module has an internal cache of some sort, you will get two copies of the cache and thus perhaps twice the memory use.)