Transparent Proxies (DEPRECATED)¶

Warning This is a feature that was tried experimentally long ago, and we found no really good use cases. The basic functionality is still there, but we don’t recommend using it. Some of the examples below might not work any more (e.g. you can’t tproxy a list object any more). The rest can be done by hacking in standard Python. If anyone is interested in working on tproxy again, he is welcome, but we don’t regard this as an interesting extension.

PyPy’s Transparent Proxies allow routing of operations on objects to a callable. Application-level code can customize objects without interfering with the type system - type(proxied_list) is list holds true when proxied_list is a proxied built-in list - while giving you full control on all operations that are performed on the proxied_list .

See [D12.1] for more context, motivation and usage of transparent proxies.

Example of the core mechanism¶ The following example proxies a list and will return 42 on any addition operations: $ py.py --objspace-std-withtproxy >>>> from __pypy__ import tproxy >>>> def f(operation, *args, **kwargs): >>>> if operation == '__add__': >>>> return 42 >>>> raise AttributeError >>>> >>>> i = tproxy(list, f) >>>> type(i) list >>>> i + 3 42

Example of recording all operations on builtins¶ Suppose we want to have a list which stores all operations performed on it for later analysis. We can use the lib_pypy/tputil.py module to help with transparently proxying builtin instances: from tputil import make_proxy history = [] def recorder ( operation ): history . append ( operation ) return operation . delegate () >>>> l = make_proxy ( recorder , obj = []) >>>> type ( l ) list >>>> l . append ( 3 ) >>>> len ( l ) 1 >>>> len ( history ) 2 make_proxy(recorder, obj=[]) creates a transparent list proxy that allows us to delegate operations to the recorder() function. Calling type(l) does not lead to any operation being executed at all. Note that append() shows up as __getattribute__() and that type(l) does not show up at all - the type is the only aspect of the instance which the proxy controller cannot change.

Transparent Proxy PyPy builtins and support¶ If you are using the –objspace-std-withtproxy option the __pypy__ module provides the following builtins: tproxy ( type, controller ) Returns a proxy object representing the given type and forwarding all operations on this type to the controller. On each operation, controller(opname, *args, **kwargs) will be called. get_tproxy_controller ( obj ) ¶ Returns the responsible controller for a given object. For non-proxied objects None is returned.

tputil helper module¶ The lib_pypy/tputil.py module provides: make_proxy ( controller, type, obj ) ¶ Creates a transparent proxy controlled by the given controller callable. The proxy will appear as a completely regular instance of the given type, but all operations on it are sent to the specified controller - which receives a ProxyOperation instance on each operation. If type is not specified, it defaults to type(obj) if obj is specified. ProxyOperation instances have the following attributes: proxyobj ¶ The transparent proxy object of this operation. opname ¶ The name of this operation. args ¶ Any positional arguments for this operation. kwargs ¶ Any keyword arguments for this operation. obj ¶ (Only if provided to make_proxy() ) A concrete object. delegate ( ) ¶ If a concrete object instance obj was specified in the call to make_proxy() , then proxyoperation.delegate() can be called to delegate the operation to the object instance.

Further points of interest¶ A lot of tasks could be performed using transparent proxies, including, but not limited to: Remote versions of objects, on which we can directly perform operations (think about transparent distribution)

Access to persistent storage such as a database (imagine an SQL object mapper which looks like any other object).

Access to external data structures, such as other languages, as normal objects (of course some operations could raise exceptions, but since operations are executed at the application level, that is not a major problem)