[throwathrowaway]

> Basically, exec and eval don't work. Since we don't use those in production code at Google, this seemed acceptable.

What about stuff like literal_eval? Or even just monkeypatching with name.__dict__[param] = value ?

> It does fine grained locking. Mutable data structures like lists and dicts do their own locking. Incidentally, this is one reason why supporting C extensions would be complicated.

Would there be a succinct theoretical description of exactly how that's implemented anywhere? What about things like numpy arrays.

[trotterdylan]

> > Basically, exec and eval don't work. Since we don't use those in production code at Google, this seemed acceptable. > What about stuff like literal_eval? Or even just monkeypatching with name.__dict__[param] = value ?

literal_eval could in principle be supported I think. name.__dict__[param] = value works as you'd expect:

  $ make run
  class A(object):
    pass
  a = A()
  a.__dict__['foo'] = 'bar'
  print a.foo
  bar

EDIT: fixed formatting

[ehsankia]

Hmm, numpy isn't pure python, is it? If I read correctly this only works with pure python.

[genericpseudo]

By volume numpy is mostly assembler written to the Fortran ABI (it's a LAPACK/BLAS-etc wrapper).