Ah, this is great. I definitely like the idea of a generator version of os.listdir(). And I like the name iterdir() -- it fits with iteritems() etc. They've gone in 3.x, of course, but listdir didn't change to an iterator, so...

See also Betterwalk, my work-in-progress with very similar goals: https://github.com/benhoyt/betterwalk#readme

It implements iterdir(), as well as iterdir_stat() which yields (name, stat) tuples. iterdir_stat() is especially important on Windows, where the directory iteration functions (FindFirstFile/FindNextFile) already give you full stat information.

The intent of Betterwalk is to use these functions to speed up os.walk() by 2-3 times (and that's with the ctypes version, so it'll only get better in pure C).

So I'm +1 for adding iterdir(), and I'd love to see iterdir_stat() so users can write fast os.walk() type functions without resorting to C.

I'll look over the attached patches at some stage, especially the Windows code.