What are some (concrete) use-cases for metaclasses?

Question

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

Answer 1

I was thinking the same thing just yesterday and completely agree. The complications in the code caused by attempts to make it more declarative generally make the codebase harder to maintain, harder to read and less pythonic in my opinion. It also normally requires a lot of copy.copy()ing (to maintain inheritance and to copy from class to instance) and means you have to look in many places to see whats going on (always looking from metaclass up) which goes against the python grain also. I have been picking through formencode and sqlalchemy code to see if such a declarative style was worth it and its clearly not. Such style should be left to descriptors (such as property and methods) and immutable data. Ruby has better support for such declarative styles and I am glad the core python language is not going down that route.

I can see their use for debugging, add a metaclass to all your base classes to get richer info. I also see their use only in (very) large projects to get rid of some boilerplate code (but at the loss of clarity). sqlalchemy for example does use them elsewhere, to add a particular custom method to all subclasses based on an attribute value in their class definition e.g a toy example

class test(baseclass_with_metaclass):
    method_maker_value = "hello"

could have a metaclass that generated a method in that class with special properties based on "hello" (say a method that added "hello" to the end of a string). It could be good for maintainability to make sure you did not have to write a method in every subclass you make instead all you have to define is method_maker_value.

The need for this is so rare though and only cuts down on a bit of typing that its not really worth considering unless you have a large enough codebase.