[Python-Dev] PEP 574 -- Pickle protocol 5 with out-of-band data

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 7:18 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> Another example is the multiprocessing module: it's very safe to
> assume that the parent and the child are using the same interpreter
> :-). There's no fundamental reason you shouldn't be able to send
> bytecode between them.

You put a smiley on it, but is this actually guaranteed on all
platforms? On Unix-like systems, presumably it's using fork() and thus
will actually use the exact same binary, but what about on Windows,
where a new process has to be spawned? Can you say "spawn me another
of this exact binary blob", or do you have to identify it by a file
name?

It wouldn't be a problem for the nonportable mode to toss out an
exception in weird cases like this, but it _would_ be a problem if
that causes a segfault or something.

ChrisA