LNlnyan·Jul 10, 2021Submission
Multipledispatch: A relatively sane approach to multiple dispatch in Python
2 points · Open discussionmrocklin
multipledispatch
Python2015–2021
mrocklin / multipledispatch
multipledispatch
Multiple dispatch
4Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
849GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Multiple dispatch
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-03-13 12:02:20 UTC to 2021-07-10 11:56:59 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesI disagree. From the end section of "real-world usage examples", there is this library https://github.com/mrocklin/multipledispatch/ that implements "Decorators for registration. It's used in at least one (probably many more) serious open-source project that I know of: GPflow https://github.com/GPflow/GPflow/blob/master/gpflow/expectat... .
"Decorators for preconditions" look pretty neat as well. It's a little sad that the preconditions themselves have to be written inside strings though.
In Python decorators they don't tell you aboutOoh Python! Check out https://github.com/mrocklin/multipledispatch which is a little more fleshed out than Guido's implementation. From the author of toolz and dask so you know it's good ;)
I also find that multiple dispatch is something that's occasionally handy, but single dispatch is truly everywhere. I think if you broke down multipledispatch uses in languages which embrace it (e.g. CLOS), the mix is like 95% single, 5% >single. For single dispatch in python, check out https://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html#functools.s... which was added in to the Python 3.4 stdlib. The alternative is the OOP subclassing style, which works but IMHO isn't very readable.
In A polyglot's guide to multiple dispatch – part 2While the result is probably correct, your argument is, odd. :)
Hammers in nails with an orange, and this folks, is how Black and Decker makes better drills than Makita.
The single reason that OCaml excels at compilers is due to pattern matching. It _removes_ all those explicit conditionals by making them implicit.
http://andrej.com/plzoo/
Python has excellent affordances for writing compilers, they just have to be used.
https://github.com/mrocklin/multipledispatch/
https://github.com/Suor/patterns
In How to Implement a Programming Language in JavaScript