Use cases for decorators in Python

Core built-in decorators

• @classmethod
• @staticmethod.
• TODO @property
• TODO @getter, @setter, @deleter

Standard libraries

• TODO functools
  • @cache
  • @cached_property
  • @lru_cache
  • @total_ordering
  • @singledispatch
  • @wraps
• TODO dataclasses
• TODO https://docs.python.org/3/library/contextlib.html#contextlib.contextmanager
• TODO https://docs.python.org/3/library/abc.html#abc.abstractmethod
• TODO https://docs.python.org/3/library/enum.html#enum.unique
• TODO https://docs.python.org/3/library/atexit.html#atexit.register

Some Libraries

• Flask uses them to mark and configure the routes.
• Pytest uses them to add marks to the tests.

Other uses

• Logging calls with parameters.
• Logging elapsed time of calls.
• Access control in Django or other web frameworks. (e.g. login required)
• Memoization (caching)
• Retry
• Function timeout
• Locking for thread safety
• Decorator Library