brettcannon/basicenum

Simple(r) enums

basicenum

Simple(r) enums.

basicenum.compat

A (mostly) API-compatible re-implementation of enum.Enum from the stdlib (plus related code).

The goal for this module was to try and re-implement as much of the API of enum.Enum as possible while using modern Python features. While this does lead to some API breakage (e.g. type(enum.member) == type(enum) is no longer true), it mostly revolves around metaclass-level details. If you rely on the surface API for enum.Enum, then this module should be compatible.

API Compatibility

Using the example enum:

class Colour(Enum):
    RED = auto()
    GREEN = auto()
    BLUE = auto()

The compatibility with enum.Enum is:

Feature	Supported?
repr(Colour.RED)	✅
str(Colour.RED)	✅
type(Colour.RED)	❌ (Member instead)
isinstance(Colour.RED, Colour)	✅
iter(Colour)	✅
hash(Colour.RED)	✅
Colour(1)	✅
Colour["RED"]	✅
Colour.RED in Colour	✅
Colour.RED.name	✅
Colour.RED.value	✅
auto()	✅
_generate_next_value_()	✅
Colour.__members__	✅
Colour.RED == Colour.RED	✅
Restricted subclassing	❌
Pickling	✅
Functional API	✅ (via create())

Type Checking

Unfortunately, type checkers hard-code their support for enum.Enum. That means they do not recognize members of basicenum.compat.Enum as being instances of Member or matching the API of members of enum.Enum.

Luckily, you can lie to the type checkers. You can tell them to type check as if you're using enum while using basicenum.compat during execution.

from typing import TYPE_CHECKING

if TYPE_CHECKING:
    from enum import Enum, auto
else:
    from basicenum.compat import Enum, auto

Benchmarking

If you install the [benchmark] extra, you can use richbench to see a performance comparison between enum and basicenum.compat.

Results

Using a AMD Ryzen™ 7 7840U w/ Radeon™ 780M Graphics × 16 w/ Python 3.12.1:

richbench --markdown --repeat 5 --times 5 --benchmark compat benchmarks/

                                     Benchmarks, repeat=5, number=5

Benchmark	Min	Max	Mean	Min (+)	Max (+)	Mean (+)
import	0.411	0.416	0.413	0.041 (10.1x)	0.050 (8.3x)	0.043 (9.5x)
creation w/ auto()	0.221	0.225	0.223	0.046 (4.8x)	0.047 (4.8x)	0.046 (4.8x)
_generate_next_value_()	0.184	0.186	0.185	0.053 (3.5x)	0.053 (3.5x)	0.053 (3.5x)
creation w/ constants	0.156	0.157	0.157	0.041 (3.8x)	0.042 (3.8x)	0.041 (3.8x)
functional API	0.181	0.183	0.182	0.042 (4.3x)	0.043 (4.2x)	0.043 (4.3x)
isinstance(..., Enum)	0.039	0.039	0.039	0.119 (-3.1x)	0.121 (-3.1x)	0.120 (-3.1x)
iter(Enum)	0.282	0.284	0.283	0.094 (3.0x)	0.096 (3.0x)	0.095 (3.0x)
Enum(...)	0.109	0.110	0.110	0.053 (2.1x)	0.055 (2.0x)	0.053 (2.1x)
Enum[...]	0.025	0.026	0.026	0.025 (1.0x)	0.027 (-1.1x)	0.026 (-1.0x)
... in Enum	0.036	0.036	0.036	0.068 (-1.9x)	0.069 (-1.9x)	0.068 (-1.9x)
member access	0.066	0.068	0.067	0.067 (-1.0x)	0.067 (1.0x)	0.067 (-1.0x)
value access	0.225	0.230	0.228	0.044 (5.1x)	0.044 (5.2x)	0.044 (5.2x)
equality	0.064	0.064	0.064	0.063 (1.0x)	0.064 (-1.0x)	0.064 (1.0x)
repr	0.118	0.119	0.118	0.093 (1.3x)	0.093 (1.3x)	0.093 (1.3x)
str	0.067	0.067	0.067	0.061 (1.1x)	0.061 (1.1x)	0.061 (1.1x)
hashing	0.103	0.103	0.103	0.103 (-1.0x)	0.104 (-1.0x)	0.103 (-1.0x)
pickling	0.113	0.114	0.114	0.113 (1.0x)	0.113 (1.0x)	0.113 (1.0x)
unpickling	0.109	0.111	0.109	0.109 (1.0x)	0.109 (1.0x)	0.109 (1.0x)
__members__	0.126	0.128	0.127	0.027 (4.7x)	0.028 (4.5x)	0.027 (4.7x)
@unique	0.270	0.274	0.273	0.058 (4.7x)	0.061 (4.5x)	0.059 (4.6x)

Module Contents

Enum

The class to inherit from to create an enum.

Member

The class which all enum members are instances of.

auto()

Function for automatic, incrementing integer member values.

@unique

Guarantee that all enum members have unique values.

Raises ValueError if values are not all unique.

create()

A re-implementation of the functional API of enum.Enum.

def create(
    enum_name, member_names, /, *, module=None, qualname=None, type=None, start=1
): ...