On Sat, 1 Aug 2020 at 22:42, Eric V. Smith <eric@trueblade.com> wrote:

While they're immutable at the Python level, strings (and all other
objects) are mutated at the C level, due to reference count updates. You
need to consider this if you're sharing objects without locking or other
synchronization.

This is interesting. What if you want to have a language that uses only immutable objects and garbage collection? Could smart pointers address this problem?

Yes, garbage collection changes the picture entirely, with or without immutable objects. But the original topic was cross-processs shared memory, and I don't know of any cross-process aware garbage collectors that support shared memory. Although such a thing could easily exist without my knowledge.

Eric