@layday Is it okay if I repurpose this issue as an "Improve import time of various stdlib modules" like #109653 but for 3.14?

I've got some pprint improvements, and if we have importlib.metadata and some others, we can group them under the same umbrella issue like last time.

Sure!

I've opened a PR over at the importlib_metadata repo that avoids importing inspect. python/importlib_metadata#499

importlib.metadata imports zipfile at the top for a function that won't be called in the vast majority of cases.
Some other less frequently-used imports which are only accessed once or twice, such as json, could also be tucked away in their calling functions.

@layday were you planning on tackling these?

It also imports importlib.abc, which in turn imports importlib.resources, to subclass an ABC with a single, non-abstract method

This seems to be solved on main, importlib.abc no longer imports importlib.resources.

I've opened a PR over at the importlib_metadata repo that avoids importing inspect. python/importlib_metadata#499

This has been merged and released in version 8.4 of importlib_metadata 🎉

importlib.metadata imports zipfile at the top for a function that won't be called in the vast majority of cases. It also imports importlib.abc, which in turn imports importlib.resources, to subclass an ABC with a single, non-abstract method - I assume redefining the method in importlib.metadata would be harmless. Some other less frequently-used imports which are only accessed once or twice, such as json, could also be tucked away in their calling functions.

I've submitted python/importlib_metadata#502 that defers zip import, and python/importlib_metadata#503 which defers json and platform.

(removing the 3.14 label since features always target the main branch)