One of the issues that showed up during the overlong TIOBE- thread and spinoffs is that there's no portable way to get a named shared memory segment (as distinguished from a disk-backed file) using the mmap module. Most unix variants provide a memory-backed file system that works for this, but it's name changes from distro to distro and even installation to installation. It's not clear to me that non-Unix platforms provide such a file system. The Posix solution is shm_open, which accepts a name for rendezvous and returns a file descriptor suitable for passing to mmap. Passing the file descriptor to anything but fstat, ftruncate, close and mmap is undefined. We'd also need to add shm_unlink to remove the shared segment, as the object created by shm_open isn't necessarily visible in the file system name space. shm_open has five values that can be used in it's flags argument, but those are shared with open and already available in the os module. This seems like a slam-dunk to me, but... 1) Is there some reason not to just add these two functions? 2) Are there any supported platforms with mmap and without shm_open/unlink? 3) Is this simple enough that a PEP isn't needed, just a patch in an issue? Thanks, http://www.mired.org/ Independent Software developer/SCM consultant, email for more information. O< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - www.asciiribbon.org