On 21 June 2015 at 19:48, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> wrote:
On Sun, 21 Jun 2015 16:31:33 +1000 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
For inter-interpreter communication, the worst case scenario is having to rely on a memcpy based message passing system (which would still be faster than multiprocessing's serialisation + IPC overhead)
And memcpy() updates pointer references to dependent objects magically? Surely you meant the memdeepcopy() function that's part of every standard C library!
We already have the tools to do deep copies of object trees (although I'll concede I *was* actually thinking in terms of the classic C/C++ mistake of carelessly copying pointers around when I wrote that particular message). One of the options for deep copies tends to be a pickle/unpickle round trip, which will still incur the serialisation overhead, but not the IPC overhead. "Faster message passing than multiprocessing" sets the baseline pretty low, after all. However, this is also why Eric mentions the notions of object ownership or limiting channels to less than the full complement of Python objects. As an *added* feature at the Python level, it's possible to initially enforce restrictions that don't exist in the C level subinterpeter API, and then work to relax those restrictions over time. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia