[Python-Dev] PEP 574 -- Pickle protocol 5 with out-of-band data (original) (raw)

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Thu Mar 29 04:49:26 EDT 2018

On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 7:18 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:

Another example is the multiprocessing module: it's very safe to assume that the parent and the child are using the same interpreter :-). There's no fundamental reason you shouldn't be able to send bytecode between them.

You put a smiley on it, but is this actually guaranteed on all platforms? On Unix-like systems, presumably it's using fork() and thus will actually use the exact same binary, but what about on Windows, where a new process has to be spawned? Can you say "spawn me another of this exact binary blob", or do you have to identify it by a file name?

It wouldn't be a problem for the nonportable mode to toss out an exception in weird cases like this, but it would be a problem if that causes a segfault or something.

ChrisA

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