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by hn_acc_2 1915 days ago
What other packages have you seen abusing import side effects?

Shopify is the first one I've seen, so I don't think it's quite as common as you are implying, but I'm curious to know what other bad behavior you have found

5 comments

Sometimes libraries do a switcheroo where they run interpreted code on startup to locate the "real" implementation in a shared object, and then load that and replace themselves with it. I'm not sure this is really idomatic, but here's an example of what it looks like from OpenCV:

https://github.com/opencv/opencv/blob/master/modules/python/...

Not GP but I've been bitten by plenty of first-party implicit side-effects, both intended (by not me not now) and not (by me or otherwise).
LaunchDarkly does. It does some querying behind the scenes and added a significant delay to the coldstarts of our lambda apis
Their PHP one had a similar shell_exec after-affect (c2017), caused some odd things in our logs but we backed away from that solution
SKiDL (circuit design library) does this to a very large extent...

https://github.com/xesscorp/skidl

An example in the standard library is the antigravity package. While it is an inside joke it still requires a HTTP transaction similar to the shopify package import.