“STD” stands for Sleazy, Tattered and Dead

My latest discovery of a behavior bug in Python earned me some negative comments. I have to admit that the way I blogged about it and how I reported the bug was not that fair. It was just one bug in a million and I was surprised how late it was discovered. I was really puzzled because of that.

Anyhow. That's not what I want to blog about here; more about my bad experiences with the standard library in general. Everybody who knows me know that I hate things quickly and that I'm crazy about beautiful code. Especially in the Python land there are some guys like Christopher Lenz and the trac team or Georg Brandl who write beautiful code just as I like it :)

The Python Standard Library But why am I especially mad about the standard library? The reason for this is that the standard library has some problems (caused by the fact that it's the standard library). A lot of stuff ended up in Python a long, long time ago. And that was fine for the time. I can't blame anyone for the state of the standard library. A lot of stuff was added to it long before I even knew what a computer was. Let's take cgi as an excellent example. cgi was, when it was created, CGI a nice little protocol that just worked. And I really have to give kudos to the developers of this library for doing tons of stuff right. It may sound awkward if you know the library in detail, but believe me, the fact alone that it nearly worked flawlessly with WSGI is noteworthy. It's incredible if you think that WSGI was added years after the library was written. So some forward thinking in terms of “decoupling” it from CGI did the library very well. However the age of cgi shines through. I just recently discovered that the infamous cgi.FieldStorage provides multipart/mixed support. This is incredible. While it's specified as part of HTML4 it was never implemented in a browser people actually used on the world-wide web. The downside is that, like many other libraries in the stdlib, it mixes a high-level API with low-level parsing features. For example if you access a key in a field storage you can't trust that key. It could either be a string, a FieldStorage or a list or strings or FieldStorage`s or both at the time thanks to the `multipart/mixed support.. Hardly anyone knows that because he trusts the data in that it returns the correct value. I guess there are enough Python scripts out there that would die with an internal server error if you pass input data via form that changes from a string into a FieldStorage . The days when you could trust your user to submit the data you expect are long gone. And security and browser bugs are things that change on a nearly on a monthly basis. To savely use FieldStorage you have to un-magicify it by walking it and unpacking the data into something you can trust. Moving all files into one dict, all strings into another one etc. So in older Werkzeug versions and in current Paste/Webob versions the field storage is traversed and preprocessed before the data is handled to the developer. And the cgi module is one of those I had the least problems with. Besides having an archaic API it also features some serious fuckups like accessing sys.argv when you least expect it, undocumented logging code and years of backwards compatibility. Thanks to the magic API it was also impossible to select the upload storage based on the content length or stop parsing if resources are exhausted (someone trying to submit a gigabyte of form data to the server, which is always stored in memory). The Cookie module is one of my “favourites”. It comes with backwards compatible code that can be used to let an attacker execute arbitrary code on the server and has an API that is so weird and magical that few in the history of Python frameworks exposed that API to the user. On parsing errors it drops all the cookie values and it does not very well with real-world cookies which means that you can have a lost cookie very fast. The morsel stuff it uses internally is written in a way that you can only add support for stuff like HttpOnly by subclassing it and overriding builtin and undocumented attributes. Until recently urllib didn't had proper timeout support making it practically impossible to safely use it in a web application. The socket.setdefaulttimeout() hacks have so many problems, don't even get me started. And I'm not mad that there was no timeout support. My problem solely is that the library was written in a way that it's impossible to add such missing features by hand without rewriting the library. BaseHTTPServer is another library that has magic built-in. Without copy/paste of undocumented code you can't write a web server that listens for all HTTP methods. (Not true, there is a way. You could override __getattr__ , look for do_* attributes and forwarding that to a proxy method but …) Do you know the codeop module? It's used to implement the Python-version of the Python interactive shell. It works like this: compile the code, compile the code with a newline at the end, compile the code with two newlines at the end and compare the string value of exceptions raised to figure out if we are at the end of the input -.- Until Python 2.6 there was no documented way to load a file from the Zip file as a file descriptor, rather than a complete string. Do you know imaplib ? In the real world it's nearly unusable because it stops half way and returns values in a half-parsed and undocumented format making it impossible to actually do anything useful it with except for the very basics. And I'm not talking about stuff that was now finally deprecated like dircache , sv or god knows what is in the stdlib nobody knows about or locale which is not process-safe and so useless that the Babel guys see no way except reimplementing everything from it as separate new library.

Why is it in that Sad State? How does stuff go into the standard library? Maybe we should go there. I'm not sure how that happens. Some stuff went into the standard library I'm very happy about. Modules like threading , multiprocessing , urllib , json etc. These modules have one thing in common: They either implement something that is heavily platform dependent, essential or standardized and stable. Other stuff went into the standard library just to decay there. For example we have the cgi module, the webbrowser module (which should be part of the GUI libraries, not a Programming language's standard library) etc. What is a standard libary for anyways? A standard library is shipped as part of the language and should make it possible to make applications platform independent. To provide often used features and implement them in a way that everybody can use it, from any context. Not just single-threaded command line applications. A cool standard library would provide IO access, filesystem and platform introspection helpers, access to the programming language internals (a interface for debuggers, access to the AST / compiler / bytecode / garbage collector etc.), support for package distribution, ways to extend the import system etc. There would be kick-ass unicode support, regular expressions, datetime objects, collections and other data structures etc. Not standard library worthy is stuff like any kind of web development support. These things change quicker than you can sing the Spam song. Also a UI toolkit like Tk is something that's not standard library worthy (especially because it's rendering widgets like it's 1985). Why is there support for wave files? Especially in such a useful way. Why are there 5 or more file-system databases like bsddb? Why is there an SQLite adapter shipped? Why do we have parsers for robot.txt files? plist? asyncore? commands / popen2 and tons of other redundant ways to invoke external applications and get the output? The builtin XML support is in such a bad state due to the fact that XML and the technologies that make it worthwhile are so complex that they require more bugfixes / releases of the libraries that implement it or change so quickly that the standard library can't keep up. Minidom is annoying, the standard etree doesn't even support printing of XML documents with custom namespaces without falling back to unreadable names. (remember that XML was sold to use as human readable?).

Your area of expertise != Our area of expertise I'm one of those developers that really likes to write library with a nice API and that reads through tons of RFCs, blog posts to similar topics etc. to deliver a nearly-perfect library in the end. Of course I fail in delivering perfect libraries. Far from it. However I try to improve the stuff I write over time, learning of my mistakes and improving them. From nearly two years of Jinja developing, the feedback I've got, studying of similar code and more I was able to collect some knowledge to know how template engines in Python may work and what can be changed in the language to improve the experience. I just recently started diving into the gory details of HTTP, browser bugs and everything else. I had a look at earlier code I've written and had to notice that I was stupid and solved problems in a way that they seem to work, without seeing the bigger picture. This experience comes over time and it takes a couple of releases to really come up with an implementation that works like it should. I've seen from other project that I'm not alone with that. Compare older Django versions with more recent ones. Earlier Django versions monkey patched modules to move models into other modules, CherryPy started as a standalone server in the pre-WSGI days that even went as far as implementing a Python-inspired language for the application code that compiles down to Python (I'm not exactly sure how that worked. I just remember something like that. Correct me if I'm wrong). Zope is in it's third iteration as well, Ian seems to have learned from mistakes as well and fixes them in WebOb now, Genshi took over Kid and is its unofficial successor fixing problems learned from there etc. This is something you can't do in the standard library. Once code is there, it sticks. So nobody can be blamed for problems in the standard library. This is what happens if code ends up there. This is the effect a standard library has on code. So far I have just contributed two modules to the standard library. One is the ast module which provides compiler.ast like access to the new Python AST, incorporating experiences I've got when working on Jinja and Genshi. The other one is the ordered dict which isn't yet there, but where I suppose it will be accepted in one way or another. The experience for those two libraries was interesting. The intentions I had with the AST module seem to clash with Guido's believes in Python a bit. When Google launched the AppEngine I and Christopher Lenz had a discussion with Guido via mail why the _ast (the internal module used by ast ) module was unavailable there. Between the lines you could hear that he was not very happy with giving Python modules the access to the compiler: IMO it's more that because it was available people flocked to it as a timesaver. As the compiler package has turned out to be a ridiculous maintenance nightmare, nobody really wants to support that any more. Hopefully the pgen2 package (which is more flexible and more limited) is easier to use. I can highly recommend it. pgen2 , if you don't know it, is the library working in the 2to3 tool and Sphinx which is a (slowish) Python parser written in Python. I noticed Guido's dislike in Python code generating and compiling Python code last djangocon as well. He started his keynote by joking about how the Django template engine is superior to anything else out there. (Of course I don't know if he means the implementation or philosophy, but something inside me told me he was happy that it was evaluating a custom AST and not compiling down to Python) I suppose that's fine. Python is his brain child, but I was hoping he could see that for quite a few situations it would be helpful to have an AST to play around and compile it down to Python bytecode. So what does this have to do with the standard library? A lot if you think about it. It basically means that a library in the standard library is no longer the library of the person who wrote it. It's part of a bigger plan. Suddenly different rules apply. Updated are distributed with Python as I've said earlier already. But that's not the only thing that changes. The philosophy changes as well. Normally if I notice that something does not work as expected, I consider changing it with a deprecating warning or starting a separate library that is backwards incompatible but fixes those problems (like I did with Jinja 2). In the standard library you are forced to live with some bugs if they are not fixable in a backwards compatible way. Someone else will suddenly decide that changes won't go into a library because it would break code, something the Python team can't allow. And this is a great thing. It means that updating from one Python version to another is in general very painless. It just has negative implications on libraries that ended up there too early or have to be changed to stay up with latest developments. On the other hand stuff that does belong into the standard library should get some more love. Why is there no function yielding file names in a directory instead of returning a list? Why don't we have a module that gives us colors for the terminal in a platform-independent way? What about adding unicode support to Python's regular expressions? Or implement some more UTRs for the unicodedata module? Platform independent file locking and file change notifications? That would be honking great!