New in Python 3.8:
Some of the benefits of interfaces and protocols are type hinting during the development process using tools built into IDEs and static type analysis for detection of errors before runtime. This way, a static analysis tool can tell you when you check your code if you’re trying to access any members that are not defined on an object, instead of only finding out at runtime.
The typing.Protocol class was added to Python 3.8 as a mechanism for “structural subtyping.” The power behind this is that it can be used as an implicit base class. That is, any class that has members that match the Protocol‘s defined members is considered to be a subclass of it for purposes of static type analysis.
The basic example given in PEP 544 shows how this can be used.
from typing import Protocol
class SupportsClose(Protocol):
def close(self) -> None:
# ...
class Resource:
# ...
def close(self) -> None:
self.file.close()
self.lock.release()
def close_all(things: Iterable[SupportsClose]) -> None:
for thing in things:
thing.close()
file = open('foo.txt')
resource = Resource()
close_all([file, resource]) # OK!
close_all([1]) # Error: 'int' has no 'close' method
Note: The typing-extensions package backports typing.Protocol for Python 3.5+.