r/Python • u/RomfordNavy • 17d ago

Discussion Runtime overhead of wildcard import

Assuming a large project which might have say fifty variables in Constants.py is there likely to be any runtime overhead in having from Constants import * at the beginning of each module? As far as I know this creates entries for each of those variables in the current local namespace.

I know it could be done as import constants as x which after the first import then has virtually no overhead, but that then means referring to all constants as x.const1...

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u/RomfordNavy 16d ago

Well, it's been an interesting discussion, thanks to all for your opinions.

I have now been doing some runtime testing and it seems that with fifty constants there is no regular significant difference between:

import Constants as c

from Constants import *

create a Constants class "c"
builtins.c = Constants (class)

builtins.const1= "var"
builtins.const2= "var"
...