Runtime Reflection Lite

Lightweight runtime reflection for Python — with proper type awareness.

🚀 Why this exists

Python has powerful introspection capabilities, but working with them in practice can be messy:

• Type hints are not always resolved
• Metadata is scattered across different APIs
• Understanding structure at runtime requires a lot of boilerplate

This library provides a clean and consistent abstraction layer for inspecting Python code at runtime.

👉 The goal is simple: Make runtime structure easy to access, understand, and use

✨ Features

• 🔍 Inspect modules, classes, and functions
• 🧠 Resolve type hints (including forward references)
• 🔐 Understand encapsulation and structure
• ⚡ Lightweight implementation (no source code parsing)
• 🧩 Clean API for building higher-level tooling

📦 Use cases

This library is especially useful when building:

• Frameworks
• Dependency injection systems
• Code analysis tools
• Runtime validation systems
• Developer tooling

👉 If you're working with dynamic architectures, this removes a lot of friction.

🏗 Design philosophy

Unlike heavier reflection systems, this project deliberately avoids:

• ❌ Parsing source code
• ❌ Full AST inspection

This keeps it:

✅ Fast ✅ Predictable ✅ Easy to integrate

⚙️ Example

from runtime.reflection.lite import MemberFilter, MemberInfo, Class, Method, reflect, get_signature, get_members

class Class1:
     def __init__(self, value: str):
          self.__value = value

     def do_something(self, suffix: str | None = None) -> str:
          return self.__value + (suffix or "")

reflection: Class = reflect(Class1)
reflection.constructor.signature # -> (value: str)
member_info, method = reflection.members.subset_methods()["do_something"] # -> tuple[MemberInfo, Method]

signature1 = get_signature(Class1.do_something) # -> (suffix: str | None) -> str
signature2 = get_signature(Class1.__init__) # -> (value: str)

members = get_members(Class1, filter = MemberFilter.FUNCTIONS_AND_METHODS)
member_info, member = members["do_something"] # -> MemberInfo, Member

Full documentation

Go to documentation