request: Statically evaluating module-level hasattr checks

This is a feature request, for mypy to enhance its static evaluation for boolean expressions involving sys.platform/sys.version_info to also handle expressions like hasattr(module_object, "constant string").

background

A common idiom in the standard library is to have functions/constants/etc. that are only exposed on certain platforms. For example, select.epoll only exists on Linux and illumos, socket.fromshare only exists on Windows, and os.preadv only exists on "Linux 2.6.30 and newer, FreeBSD 6.0 and newer, OpenBSD 2.7 and newer".

Currently, the way mypy handles these cases is:

• typeshed contains if sys.platform == ... checks that try to approximate the runtime availability. Example
• then mypy statically evaluates these checks, so it knows which functions/constants/etc. are available

So that works about as well as anything could. The static approximations aren't always exactly correct (e.g. the epoll example linked above gives the wrong answer on illumos), but they're "good enough" and can be improved over time if they cause problems.

the problem

Say we have a library which wants to use or expose certain features in its API depending on whether or not the standard library exposes those features. For example, in Trio we define our IOManager class differently depending on whether select.epoll and select.kqueue exist, and we export a trio.socket.fromshare function iff there's a socket.fromshare.

Now we're trying to figure out how to add type annotations, and it's super awkward. So far our best attempt for the basic platform differences looks like:

if sys.platform == "win32":
    ...
elif sys.platform == "linux" or (not TYPE_CHECKING and hasattr(select, "epoll")):
    ...
# At type-checking time, assume that all platforms that aren't win32 or linux are some kind of BSD
elif TYPE_CHECKING or (not TYPE_CHECKING and hasattr(select, "kqueue")):
    ...
else:
    raise NotImplementedError

This has a few problems:

• it's complex and awkward
• it requires manually duplicating information that's already in typeshed
• it requires manually propagating any typeshed changes into our project (which seems plausible, since typeshed often contains rough approximations for platform-specific stuff)
• it requires copy/pasting this whole complex construct in multiple places around our code-base

This is a bit frustrating. It would be nice if mypy could just understand if hasattr(select, "epoll") and do the right thing. It already has all the information it needs to do that.

Start by locating mypy's existing static evaluation for sys.platform and sys.version_info, along with its tests. Trace how typeshed module attributes are represented and evaluated for constant-string hasattr checks. Done means module-level hasattr expressions can be evaluated consistently from available typeshed information, with tests covering platform-dependent attributes.