• But would that be enough? The algorithm would have to recursively dive into args to see if there's a string hidden deep inside, e.g. list[tuple[int, list["N"]]].
• And what if the user writes something hybrid, like List[list["N"]]? What other cases would we need to cover?

The tests already cover the sort of case you list here (there's a dict[int, list[List[list["T"]]] I think). We could add more variants though.

• And can we sell this as a bugfix for 3.10, or will this be a new feature in 3.11?

I think this can be considered a bugfix. get_type_hints() is supposed to evaluate forward references but it didn't in all cases.

• How will it interact with from future import annotations?

That's another interesting test case. It would basically give us two levels of stringification, like x: 'list["N"]'. We should test that get_type_hints() resolves both levels of strings.

Would also be good to test a recursive forward ref:

X = list["X"]
def f(x: X): ...
get_type_hints(f)  # hopefully no RecursionError

We guard against this sort of thing already, but we should validate it works in this case too.

You can add a NEWS entry using https://blurb-it.herokuapp.com/ as an alternative to the CLI :)

[@gvanrossum]

This is the code that I posted to the issue.

Yes, sorry for not mentioning it. Same code, different location.

[@JelleZijlstra]

I've added two more unit tests for the cases Guido and you mentioned.

[@AlexWaygood]

Thanks, added it.

Actually I'm not sure if we can find a good way to make the Annotated equality unit test work (test_get_type_hints_annotated) with this new behaviour. Maybe this is a side effect of this change that has to be accepted, but I'm happy to hear suggestions.

Actually I'm not sure if we can find a good way to make the Annotated equality unit test work (test_get_type_hints_annotated) with this new behaviour

We can just change those tests from assertIs to assertEquals. It doesn't seem important that the same object is returned.

There's no C code here, and 3.11a6 seems to be still delayed, so I'm just landing this. Sorry for the confusion.

Update: This didn't make 3.11a6. The release process was farther along than I realized.