I'm trying to debug Hy's use of bytecode. In particular, each time a module is imported, I want to see the path it was actually imported from, whether source or bytecode. Under the hood, Hy manages modules with importlib. It doesn't explicitly read or write bytecode; that's taken care of by importlib.machinery.SourceFileLoader. So it looks like what I want to do is monkey-patch Python's importing system to print the import path each time an import happens. How can I do that? I should be able to figure out how to do it for Hy once I understand how to do it for Python.
The easiest way that does not involve coding, is to start Python with two(!) verbose flags:
python -vv myscript.py
you'll get a lot of output, including all the import statements and all the files Python tries to access in order to load the module. In this example I have a simple python script that does import json:
lots of output!
[...]
# trying /tmp/json.cpython-310-x86_64-linux-gnu.so
# trying /tmp/json.abi3.so
# trying /tmp/json.so
# trying /tmp/json.py
# trying /tmp/json.pyc
# /usr/lib/python3.10/json/__pycache__/__init__.cpython-310.pyc matches /usr/lib/python3.10/json/__init__.py
# code object from '/usr/lib/python3.10/json/__pycache__/__init__.cpython-310.pyc'
[...]
Alternatively but more complex: you could change the import statement itself. For that, you can overwrite __import__, which is invoked by the import statement itself. This way you could print out all the files import actually opens.