Which special methods bypasses __getattribute__ in Python?

Question

In addition to bypassing any instance attributes in the interest of correctness, implicit special method lookup generally also bypasses the __getattribute__() method even of the object’s metaclass.

The docs mention special methods such as __hash__, __repr__ and __len__, and I know from experience it also includes __iter__ for Python 2.7.

To quote an answer to a related question:

"Magic __methods__() are treated specially: They are internally assigned to "slots" in the type data structure to speed up their look-up, and they are only looked up in these slots."

In a quest to improve my answer to another question, I need to know: Which methods, specifically, are we talking about?

Answer 1

Checked in 2.7.9

Couldn't find any way to bypass the call to __getattribute__, with any of the magical methods that are found on object or type:

# Preparation step: did this from the console
# magics = set(dir(object) + dir(type))
# got 38 names, for each of the names, wrote a.<that_name> to a file
# Ended up with this:

a.__module__
a.__base__
#...

Put this at the beginning of that file, which i renamed into a proper python module (asdf.py)

global_counter = 0

class Counter(object):
    def __getattribute__(self, name):
        # this will count how many times the method was called
        global global_counter
        global_counter += 1
        return super(Counter, self).__getattribute__(name)

a = Counter()
# after this comes the list of 38 attribute accessess
a.__module__
#...
a.__repr__
#...

print global_counter  # you're not gonna like it... it printer 38

Then i also tried to get each of those names by getattr and hasattr -> same result. __getattribute__ was called every time.

So if anyone has other ideas... I was too lazy to look inside C code for this, but I'm sure the answer lies somewhere there.

So either there's something that i'm not getting right, or the docs are lying.