What are common failure modes of Decorators?

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Quick interview answer

Common failures around Decorators: blocking the hot path, ignoring backpressure, and weak timeout/retry design. Forgetting @wraps; decorator not returning wrapper function.

Detailed answer

Failure modes for Decorators: Known pitfalls: Forgetting @wraps; decorator not returning wrapper function. • Missing timeouts / unbounded retries • No backpressure when downstream slows • Assuming ordering/guarantees the runtime does not provide How seniors prevent them: Use wraps; accept *args/**kwargs in generic decorators; prefer parameterized factory pattern. Parent context: Mitigate first, then root-cause. Check symptoms against: Forgetting @wraps; decorator not returning wrapper function..

Full explanation

Name concrete failure modes and the mitigation for each — that scores higher than a vague “it can fail.” Decorators wrap functions: @decorator applies decorator(func). functools.wraps preserves __name__/__doc__. Common for logging, auth, caching, retries.

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Parent context — Decorators

Mitigate first, then root-cause. Check symptoms against: Forgetting @wraps; decorator not returning wrapper function..

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