<ahref="https://pepy.tech/project/attrs"><imgsrc="https://static.pepy.tech/personalized-badge/attrs?period=month&units=international_system&left_color=grey&right_color=blue&left_text=Downloads%20/%20Month"alt="Downloads per month"/></a>
*attrs* is the Python package that will bring back the **joy** of **writing classes** by relieving you from the drudgery of implementing object protocols (aka [dunder methods](https://www.attrs.org/en/latest/glossary.html#term-dunder-methods)).
[Trusted by NASA](https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-profile/customizing-your-profile/personalizing-your-profile#list-of-qualifying-repositories-for-mars-2020-helicopter-contributor-achievement) for Mars missions since 2020!
Its main goal is to help you to write **concise** and **correct** software without slowing down your code.
<strong>Please consider <ahref="https://github.com/sponsors/hynek">joining them</a> to help make <em>attrs</em>’s maintenance more sustainable!</strong>
After *declaring* your attributes, *attrs* gives you:
- a concise and explicit overview of the class's attributes,
- a nice human-readable `__repr__`,
- equality-checking methods,
- an initializer,
- and much more,
*without* writing dull boilerplate code again and again and *without* runtime performance penalties.
**Hate type annotations**!?
No problem!
Types are entirely **optional** with *attrs*.
Simply assign `attrs.field()` to the attributes instead of annotating them with types.
---
This example uses *attrs*'s modern APIs that have been introduced in version 20.1.0, and the *attrs* package import name that has been added in version 21.3.0.
The classic APIs (`@attr.s`, `attr.ib`, plus their serious-business aliases) and the `attr` package import name will remain **indefinitely**.
On the tin, *attrs* might remind you of `dataclasses` (and indeed, `dataclasses` [are a descendant](https://hynek.me/articles/import-attrs/) of *attrs*).
In practice it does a lot more and is more flexible.
For instance it allows you to define [special handling of NumPy arrays for equality checks](https://www.attrs.org/en/stable/comparison.html#customization), allows more ways to [plug into the initialization process](https://www.attrs.org/en/stable/init.html#hooking-yourself-into-initialization), and allows for stepping through the generated methods using a debugger.
The maintainers of *attrs* and thousands of other packages are working with Tidelift to deliver commercial support and maintenance for the open source packages you use to build your applications.
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