[JadenV15]

closes #16747

[github-actions]

According to mypy_primer, this change has no effect on the checked open source code. 🤖🎉

[srittau]

In what situations would it return a module? The PEP only says it return a types.LazyImportType object, and a brief glance on the implementation seems to agree, although I might have overlooked a code path.

[JadenV15]

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/80015735/what-does-lazy-import-return

Will talk more later

[JelleZijlstra]

Yeah, it can return a regular module if lazy imports are disabled.

More generally, it can return anything at all if you manually put something in sys.modules, or if there's an import hook doing funny things. Therefore, there's an argument that the return type should be object (or Any).

Should we change the return type to object? I can see that going either way, but if you're manually calling __lazy_import__ you're already poking into internals and should be prepared for edge cases, so I'd favor using object to force users calling this function to confront those edge cases.