Feng Yu <rainwoodman@gmail.com> wrote:
1. If we are talking about shared memory and copy-on-write inheritance, then we are using 'fork'.
Not available on Windows. On Unix it only allows one-way communication, from parent to child.
2. Picking of inherited shared memory array can be done minimally by just picking the array_interface and the pointer address. It is because the child process and the parent share the same address space layout, guarenteed by the fork call.
Again, not everyone uses Unix. And on Unix it is not trival to pass data back from the child process. I solved that problem with Sys V IPC (pickling the name of the segment).
6. If we are to define a set of operations I would recommend take a look at OpenMP as a reference -- It has been out there for decades and used widely. An equiavlant to the 'omp parallel for' construct in Python will be a very good starting point and immediately useful.
If you are on Unix, you can just use a context manager. Call os.fork in __enter__ and os.waitpid in __exit__. Sturla