Unsoundness with `typing.IO` and friends
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- Python
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Description
The classes typing.IO, typing.BinaryIO, and typing.TextIO look like they want to be Protocols or ABCs, but in fact they are defined as regular generic classes, both at runtime and in typeshed. However, they are meant to encompass the concrete IO classes defined in the io module, and in typeshed we implement that by having these classes inherit from typing.*IO classes, even though there is no such inheritance at runtime.
This can easily lead to unsound behavior:
import io, typing
def f(x: int | io.BytesIO) -> int:
if isinstance(x, typing.BinaryIO):
return x.fileno()
return x
f(io.BytesIO()) + 1 # boom
Type checkers think BytesIO is a subclass of BinaryIO, because that's how it's defined in typeshed, but in fact it isn't at runtime.
I can see a few solutions:
- Special-case
typing.*IOin the spec and say that type checkers should rejectisinstance()/issubclass()calls involving them. - Deprecate the
typing.*IOclasses and eventually remove them, nudging people to use their own Protocols (or the newio.Reader/io.Writer) instead. This is conceptually clean but may be annoying for a lot of users; the typing classes are nice to use in simple application code. - Make these classes actually (runtime-checkable?) Protocols at runtime, though they would be unwieldily large.
Even if we do (2) or (3) type checkers might still want to do (1) since it will be a while before the relevant runtime changes take effect.
(Noticed this while looking into https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/133492 .)
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First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by reviewing the runtime behavior of typing.IO, typing.BinaryIO, typing.TextIO, and io.BytesIO, along with their typeshed relationships and the linked CPython issue. Compare the three proposed approaches and document or implement an agreed specification and runtime direction; done requires resolving how isinstance() and issubclass() should behave.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- python
- Domain
- tooling
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100