[Python-Dev] Pickle format machine independence (original) (raw)

Hrvoje Nikšić hrvoje.niksic at avl.com
Mon Apr 14 15:56:47 CEST 2008


Are pickle files intended to be readable across different machine architectures? The documentation states unequivocally that they are compatible across Python versions, but compatibility across machine architectures (wrt to differences in size and layout of primitive C types) is not explicitly addressed.

One example where I stumbled upon the incompatibility is the pickling of arrays. While pickle is normally very careful to write out numbers in a platform-independent way, arrays are written out in "tostring" format. This is filed under http://bugs.python.org/issue2389.

I can work around this issue in my application, but if this is considered a bug, I'd prefer to fix it in Python instead.



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