argparse currently defers importing copy, difflib, shutil, textwrap, and warnings using inline imports, while importing re and gettext eagerly at module scope. I think these can safely be replaced with module-level explicit lazy imports, which will make the module’s dependencies more readable and reduce the cost of a bare import argparse.

On my machine, preliminary release-build measurements using -S -X importtime show the median cumulative import time for argparse decreasing by approximately 67%, from 4,792 µs to 1,595 µs across 15 alternating runs.

Linked PRs

• GH-154638: Use lazy imports in argparse #154639