[Python-Dev] The memo of pickle

[Guido van Rossum]

[Greg E]
> > > That would break a lot of programs that use pickle
> > > without opening the file in binary mode.

[Guido]
> > Really?  That's unfortunate.

[Greg E]
> Unfortunate, yes, and true, as far as I can see. It bit me recently --
> I decided to change something to use binary pickling, and forgot to
> change the way I was opening the file.
> 
> If you must do this, I suppose you could start issuing warnings
> if pickling is done without specifying a mode, and then change
> the default later.

I thought of that.  But probably not worth the upheaval.

> If there's a way of making non-binary unpickling dramatically
> faster, though -- even if only with cPickle -- that would be a 
> *big* win, and shouldn't cause any compatibity problems.

python/sf/505705 is close to acceptance, and reduced one particularly
slow unpickling example 6-fold in speed.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)