stdlb

Wildcard-import the Python standard library

from stdlb import *

# Most of the standard library is now available:
print(f"Current directory: {getcwd()}")
stderr.write(f"Python version: {version}\n")
print(f"Today: {dt.now()}")
data = {"key": "value"}
dumps(data)  # json.dumps

Features:

• 🎯 Comprehensive coverage: 2127 symbols from 79+ stdlib modules (up from 841 symbols in v0.0.4)

• 🐍 Python 3.10-3.13 support: Automatically includes version-specific modules

• ⚡ Fast: Imports in ~57ms

• 🔒 Safe: Preserves all __builtins__, resolves name collisions intelligently

• 🧪 Well-tested: Snapshot testing tracks all exports to prevent regressions

• Install

• Coverage

• Notes

  • Collision Resolution
    • __builtins vs. module members
    • Module/Members
  • Aliases
  • Custom cached_property

• Development

Install

pip install stdlb

Coverage

stdlb now includes 79+ stdlib modules, including:

Core utilities: os, sys, pathlib, subprocess, tempfile, shutil, glob, fnmatch

Data structures & algorithms: collections, itertools, heapq, bisect, array, queue

Text processing: re, string, textwrap, difflib, unicodedata

Data formats: json, csv, configparser, pickle, base64, binascii

Math & numbers: math, cmath, decimal, fractions, statistics, random, secrets

Date & time: datetime, time, calendar, timeit

Functional programming: functools, operator, itertools

Type hints: typing, types, dataclasses, enum

Concurrency: threading, asyncio, subprocess, signal

Networking: socket, urllib, http, html, mimetypes

Cryptography: hashlib, hmac, secrets

Compression: zlib, zipfile

And more: logging, warnings, traceback, pprint, platform, locale, etc.

Version-specific modules

• Python 3.9+: graphlib, zoneinfo
• Python 3.11+: tomllib

Platform-specific symbols

Some symbols vary by platform, particularly in socket, signal, and os:

• Socket constants: AF_*, IPPROTO_*, SO_*, etc. (vary by OS)
• Signal constants: SIG* (vary by OS)
• Clock constants: CLOCK_* (vary by OS)

The library exports whatever is available on your platform. Snapshot tests are lenient about these platform-specific symbols.

Notes

I've found this especially useful in Jupyter notebooks, where I don't have an easy "add import statements as I add code" setup.

Import time is reasonable (~57ms) for the comprehensive coverage provided. See scripts/benchmark_import.py for detailed measurements.

Collision Resolution

__builtins vs. module members

stdlb avoids overwriting __builtins__ with conflicting module members, e.g.:

• open vs. os.open
• compile vs. re.compile
• pow vs. math.pow
• copyright vs. sys.copyright
• BlockingIOError vs. io.BlockingIOError

test.ipynb is executed as part of ci.yml to verify there are no __builtins__ are unexpectedly shadowed.

Module/Members

In a few cases, a top-level standard library module also contains a member with the same name (e.g. datetime, shlex, time). stdlb makes an effort to ensure the module "wins" in this case:

from stdlb import *

datetime  # <module 'datetime' from '$PYTHON_HOME/lib/python3.9/datetime.py'>
shlex     # <module 'shlex' from '$PYTHON_HOME/lib/python3.9/shlex.py'>
time      # <module 'time' (built-in)>

A few names are disambiguated with the most sensible-seeming defaults:

path     # resolves to os.path, not sys.path
join     # os.path.join, not shlex.join
Path     # pathlib.Path, not zipfile.Path
error    # re.error, not zlib.error
compress # itertools.compress, not zlib.compress
repeat   # itertools.repeat, not timeit.repeat

Use scripts/compare_versions.py to compare exports between versions and identify collisions.

Aliases

For convenience, datetime.datetime is also exposed as dt, and a few of its members are exported directly:

dt.now()       # datetime.datetime(2023, 8, 3, 10, 9, 43, 981458)
fromtimestamp  # datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp
fromisoformat  # datetime.datetime.fromisoformat

Custom cached_property

One additional bit of functionality is this custom cached_property decorator, which omits an unnecessary/unserializable lock found in functools.cached_property. cpython#87634 has more info, seems like a fix is coming in Python 3.12.

Development

This project uses uv for development.

# Install dependencies
uv sync

# Run tests
uv run pytest tests/ -v

# Test across multiple Python versions
for v in .venv/3.*/bin/python; do $v scripts/quick_test.py; done

# Regenerate __init__.py (if needed)
python scripts/generate_init.py > src/stdlb/__init__.py

# Update exports snapshot
python scripts/snapshot_exports.py

# Compare versions to check for regressions
python scripts/compare_versions.py v0.0.4 HEAD

Helper Scripts

Code Generation

• scripts/discover_stdlib.py: Analyze the stdlib and identify useful modules to include
• scripts/generate_init.py: Generate src/stdlb/__init__.py from configuration
  • Handles version-specific imports, module preservation, collision resolution
  • Configuration in VERSION_REQUIREMENTS, PRESERVE_MODULE, COLLISION_PREFERENCES

Testing & Quality Assurance

• scripts/quick_test.py: Quick functionality test across Python versions
• scripts/benchmark_import.py: Measure import time performance
• scripts/snapshot_exports.py: Generate JSON snapshot of all exported symbols
  • Output: tests/exports_snapshot.json (2127 symbols tracked)
  • Used by tests/test_exports_snapshot.py for regression detection
• scripts/compare_versions.py: Compare exports between git refs

  # Compare any two versions
  python scripts/compare_versions.py v0.0.4 v0.1.0
  python scripts/compare_versions.py <old-ref> <new-ref>
  
  # Show only FQN changes (collisions)
  python scripts/compare_versions.py v0.0.4 HEAD 2>/dev/null | grep -A 50 "Changed FQN"