What are your (concrete) use

I have a friend who likes to use metaclasses, and regularly offers them as a solution.

I am of the mind that you almost never need to use metaclasses. Why? because I figure if you are doing something like that to a class, you should probably be doing it to an object. And a small redesign/refactor is in order.

Being able to use metaclasses has caused a lot of people in a lot of places to use classes as some kind of second rate object, which just seems disastrous to me. Is programming to be replaced by meta-programming? The addition of class decorators has unfortunately made it even more acceptable.

So please, I am desperate to know your valid (concrete) use-cases for metaclasses in Python. Or to be enlightened as to why mutating classes is better than mutating objects, sometimes.

I will start:

Sometimes when using a third-party library it is useful to be able to mutate the class in a certain way.

(this is the only case I can think of, and it's not concrete)

I have a class that handles non-interactive plotting, as a frontend to Matplotlib. However, on occasion one wants to do interactive plotting. With only a couple functions I found that I was able to increment the figure count, call draw manually, etc, but I needed to do these before and after every plotting call. So to create both an interactive plotting wrapper and an offscreen plotting wrapper, I found it was more efficient to do this via metaclasses, wrapping the appropriate methods, than to do something like:

class PlottingInteractive:
    add_slice = wrap_pylab_newplot(add_slice)

This method doesn't keep up with API changes and so on, but one that iterates over the class attributes in __init__ before re-setting the class attributes is more efficient and keeps things up to date:

class _Interactify(type):
    def __init__(cls, name, bases, d):
        super(_Interactify, cls).__init__(name, bases, d)
        for base in bases:
            for attrname in dir(base):
                if attrname in d: continue # If overridden, don't reset
                attr = getattr(cls, attrname)
                if type(attr) == types.MethodType:
                    if attrname.startswith("add_"):
                        setattr(cls, attrname, wrap_pylab_newplot(attr))
                    elif attrname.startswith("set_"):
                        setattr(cls, attrname, wrap_pylab_show(attr))

Of course, there might be better ways to do this, but I've found this to be effective. Of course, this could also be done in __new__ or __init__ , but this was the solution I found the most straightforward.

I was asked the same question recently, and came up with several answers. I hope it's OK to revive this thread, as I wanted to elaborate on a few of the use cases mentioned, and add a few new ones.

Most metaclasses I've seen do one of two things:

models = {}

class ModelMetaclass(type):
    def __new__(meta, name, bases, attrs):
        models[name] = cls = type.__new__(meta, name, bases, attrs)
        return cls

class Model(object):
    __metaclass__ = ModelMetaclass

>>> class A(Model):
...     pass
...
>>> class B(A):
...     pass
...
>>> models
{'A': <__main__.A class at 0x...>,
 'B': <__main__.B class at 0x...>}

models = {}

def model(cls):
    models[cls.__name__] = cls
    return cls

@model
class A(object):
    pass

models = {}

def register_model(cls):
    models[cls.__name__] = cls

class A(object):
    pass

register_model(A)

>>> class B(A):
...     pass
...
>>> models
{'A': <__main__.A class at 0x...> # No B :(

class ModelMetaclass(type):
    def __new__(meta, name, bases, attrs):
        fields = {}
        for key, value in attrs.items():
            if isinstance(value, Field):
                value.name = '%s.%s' % (name, key)
                fields[key] = value
        for base in bases:
            if hasattr(base, '_fields'):
                fields.update(base._fields)
        attrs['_fields'] = fields
        return type.__new__(meta, name, bases, attrs)

class Model(object):
    __metaclass__ = ModelMetaclass

>>> class A(Model):
...     foo = Integer()
...
>>> class B(A):
...     bar = String()
...
>>> B._fields
{'foo': Integer('A.foo'), 'bar': String('B.bar')}

def model(cls):
    fields = {}
    for key, value in vars(cls).items():
        if isinstance(value, Field):
            value.name = '%s.%s' % (cls.__name__, key)
            fields[key] = value
    for base in cls.__bases__:
        if hasattr(base, '_fields'):
            fields.update(base._fields)
    cls._fields = fields
    return cls

@model
class A(object):
    foo = Integer()

class B(A):
    bar = String()

# B.bar has no name :(
# B._fields is {'foo': Integer('A.foo')} :(

class A(object):
    foo = Integer('A.foo')
    _fields = {'foo': foo} # Don't forget all the base classes' fields, too!

class B(A):
    bar = String()

# vs.

class B(A):
    bar = String('bar')
    _fields = {'B.bar': bar, 'A.foo': A.foo}

Having considered the most common and concrete use cases, the only cases where you absolutely HAVE to use metaclasses are when you want to modify the class name or list of base classes, because once defined, these parameters are baked into the class, and no decorator or function can unbake them.

class Metaclass(type):
    def __new__(meta, name, bases, attrs):
        return type.__new__(meta, 'foo', (int,), attrs)

class Baseclass(object):
    __metaclass__ = Metaclass

class A(Baseclass):
    pass

class B(A):
    pass

print A.__name__ # foo
print B.__name__ # foo
print issubclass(B, A)   # False
print issubclass(B, int) # True

This may be useful in frameworks for issuing warnings whenever classes with similar names or incomplete inheritance trees are defined, but I can't think of a reason beside trolling to actually change these values. Maybe David Beazley can.

Anyway, in Python 3, metaclasses also have the __prepare__ method, which lets you evaluate the class body into a mapping other than a dict , thus supporting ordered attributes, overloaded attributes, and other wicked cool stuff:

import collections

class Metaclass(type):

    @classmethod
    def __prepare__(meta, name, bases, **kwds):
        return collections.OrderedDict()

    def __new__(meta, name, bases, attrs, **kwds):
        print(list(attrs))
        # Do more stuff...

class A(metaclass=Metaclass):
    x = 1
    y = 2

# prints ['x', 'y'] rather than ['y', 'x']

class ListDict(dict):
    def __setitem__(self, key, value):
        self.setdefault(key, []).append(value)

class Metaclass(type):

    @classmethod
    def __prepare__(meta, name, bases, **kwds):
        return ListDict()

    def __new__(meta, name, bases, attrs, **kwds):
        print(attrs['foo'])
        # Do more stuff...

class A(metaclass=Metaclass):

    def foo(self):
        pass

    def foo(self, x):
        pass

# prints [<function foo at 0x...>, <function foo at 0x...>] rather than <function foo at 0x...>

You might argue ordered attributes can be achieved with creation counters, and overloading can be simulated with default arguments:

import itertools

class Attribute(object):
    _counter = itertools.count()
    def __init__(self):
        self._count = Attribute._counter.next()

class A(object):
    x = Attribute()
    y = Attribute()

A._order = sorted([(k, v) for k, v in vars(A).items() if isinstance(v, Attribute)],
                  key = lambda (k, v): v._count)

class A(object):

    def _foo0(self):
        pass

    def _foo1(self, x):
        pass

    def foo(self, x=None):
        if x is None:
            return self._foo0()
        else:
            return self._foo1(x)

Besides being much more ugly, it's also less flexible: what if you want ordered literal attributes, like integers and strings? What if None is a valid value for x ?

Here's a creative way to solve the first problem:

import sys

class Builder(object):
    def __call__(self, cls):
        cls._order = self.frame.f_code.co_names
        return cls

def ordered():
    builder = Builder()
    def trace(frame, event, arg):
        builder.frame = frame
        sys.settrace(None)
    sys.settrace(trace)
    return builder

@ordered()
class A(object):
    x = 1
    y = 'foo'

print A._order # ['x', 'y']

And here's a creative way to solve the second one:

_undefined = object()

class A(object):

    def _foo0(self):
        pass

    def _foo1(self, x):
        pass

    def foo(self, x=_undefined):
        if x is _undefined:
            return self._foo0()
        else:
            return self._foo1(x)

But this is much, MUCH voodoo-er than a simple metaclass (especially the first one, which really melts your brain). My point is, you look at metaclasses as unfamiliar and counter-intuitive, but you can also look at them as the next step of evolution in programming languages: you just have to adjust your mindset. After all, you could probably do everything in C, including defining a struct with function pointers and passing it as the first argument to its functions. A person seeing C++ for the first time might say, "what is this magic? Why is the compiler implicitly passing this to methods, but not to regular and static functions? It's better to be explicit and verbose about your arguments". But then, object-oriented programming is much more powerful once you get it; and so is this, uh... quasi-aspect-oriented programming, I guess. And once you understand metaclasses, they're actually very simple, so why not use them when convenient?

And finally, metaclasses are rad, and programming should be fun. Using standard programming constructs and design patterns all the time is boring and uninspiring, and hinders your imagination. Live a little! Here's a metametaclass, just for you.

class MetaMetaclass(type):
    def __new__(meta, name, bases, attrs):
        def __new__(meta, name, bases, attrs):
            cls = type.__new__(meta, name, bases, attrs)
            cls._label = 'Made in %s' % meta.__name__
            return cls 
        attrs['__new__'] = __new__
        return type.__new__(meta, name, bases, attrs)

class China(type):
    __metaclass__ = MetaMetaclass

class Taiwan(type):
    __metaclass__ = MetaMetaclass

class A(object):
    __metaclass__ = China

class B(object):
    __metaclass__ = Taiwan

print A._label # Made in China
print B._label # Made in Taiwan

The purpose of metaclasses isn't to replace the class/object distinction with metaclass/class - it's to change the behaviour of class definitions (and thus their instances) in some way. Effectively it's to alter the behaviour of the class statement in ways that may be more useful for your particular domain than the default. The things I have used them for are:

class Mp3File(MusicFile):
    extensions = ['.mp3']  # Register this type as a handler for mp3 files
    ...
    # Implementation of mp3 methods go here

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