attrs/docs/overview.md

Overview

In order to fulfill its ambitious goal of bringing back the joy to writing classes, it gives you a class decorator and a way to declaratively define the attributes on that class:

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Philosophy

It's about regular classes.

attrs is for creating well-behaved classes with a type, attributes, methods, and everything that comes with a class. It can be used for data-only containers like namedtuples or types.SimpleNamespace but they're just a sub-genre of what attrs is good for.

The class belongs to the users.

You define a class and attrs adds static methods to that class based on the attributes you declare. The end. It doesn't add metaclasses. It doesn't add classes you've never heard of to your inheritance tree. An attrs class in runtime is indistinguishable from a regular class: because it is a regular class with a few boilerplate-y methods attached.

Be light on API impact.

As convenient as it seems at first, attrs will not tack on any methods to your classes except for the {term}dunder ones <dunder methods>. Hence all the useful tools that come with attrs live in functions that operate on top of instances. Since they take an attrs instance as their first argument, you can attach them to your classes with one line of code.

Performance matters.

attrs runtime impact is very close to zero because all the work is done when the class is defined. Once you're instantiating it, attrs is out of the picture completely.

No surprises.

attrs creates classes that arguably work the way a Python beginner would reasonably expect them to work. It doesn't try to guess what you mean because explicit is better than implicit. It doesn't try to be clever because software shouldn't be clever.

Check out {doc}how-does-it-work if you'd like to know how it achieves all of the above.

What attrs Is Not

attrs does not invent some kind of magic system that pulls classes out of its hat using meta classes, runtime introspection, and shaky interdependencies.

All attrs does is:

1. Take your declaration,
2. write {term}dunder methods based on that information,
3. and attach them to your class.

It does nothing dynamic at runtime, hence zero runtime overhead. It's still your class. Do with it as you please.

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attrs also is not a fully-fledged serialization library. While it comes with features like converters and validators, it is meant to be a kit for building classes that you would write yourself – but with less boilerplate. If you look for powerful-yet-unintrusive serialization and validation for your attrs classes, have a look at our sibling project cattrs or our third-party extensions.

This separation of creating classes and serializing them is a conscious design decision. We don't think that your business model and your serialization format should be coupled.