Extending SWIG builtin classes

I found a solution quite by accident. I was experimenting with metaclasses, thinking I could manage to override the setattr and getattr functions of the builtin type in the subclass.

Doing this I discovered the builtins already have a metaclass (SwigPyObjectType), so my metaclass had to inherit it.

And that's it. This alone solved the problem. I would be glad if someone could explain why :

SwigPyObjectType = type(SWIGBuiltinClass)

class Meta(SwigPyObjectType):
    pass

class Thing(SWIGBuiltinClass):
    __metaclass__ = Meta

Thing.myattr = 'anything' # Works fine this time