Why is a class __dict__ a mappingproxy?
A mappingproxy is simply a dict with no __setattr__
method.
You can check out and refer to this code.
from types import MappingProxyType
d={'key': "value"}
m = MappingProxyType(d)
print(type(m)) # <class 'mappingproxy'>
m['key']='new' #TypeError: 'mappingproxy' object does not support item assignment
mappingproxy is since Python 3.3. The following code shows dict types:
class C:pass
ci=C()
print(type(C.__dict__)) #<class 'mappingproxy'>
print(type(ci.__dict__)) #<class 'dict'>
This helps the interpreter assure that the keys for class-level attributes and methods can only be strings.
Elsewhere, Python is a "consenting adults language", meaning that dicts for objects are exposed and mutable by the user. However, in the case of class-level attributes and methods for classes, if we can guarantee that the keys are strings, we can simplify and speed-up the common case code for attribute and method lookup at the class-level. In particular, the __mro__ search logic for new-style classes is simplified and sped-up by assuming the class dict keys are strings.
Since Python 3.3 mappingproxy
type was renamed from dictproxy
. There was an interesting discussion on this topic.
It's a little bit hard to find the documentation for this type, but the documentation for vars method describes this perfectly (though it wasn't documented for a while):
Objects such as modules and instances have an updateable
__dict__
attribute; however, other objects may have write restrictions on their__dict__
attributes (for example, classes use a types.MappingProxyType to prevent direct dictionary updates).
If you need to assign a new class attribute you could use setattr
. It worth to note that mappingproxy
is not JSON serializable, check out the issue to understand why.
Also the history of this type is a quite interesting:
- Python 2.7:
type(A.__dict__)
returns<type 'dict'>
astype(dict())
, and it's possible to assign new attributes through__dict__
, e.g.A.__dict__['foo'] = 'bar'
. - Python 3.0 - 3.2:
type(A.__dict__)
returns<class 'dict_proxy'>
, the difference is introduced. Trying to assign a new attribte givesTypeError
. There was an attempt to adddictproxy
as a public built-in type. - Python 3.3: adds the
<class 'mappingproxy'>
type described above.