pythonic exec* spawn*

[Daniel Nogradi]

Is it possible to pass a python object to a python program as argument?

In my program I would like to start executing an other python program
and don't wait until that finishes, only launch it and keep running
the original program. The obvious way I can think of it is using the
exec* or spawn* function families. However, these are generic
functions to start any external program and I was wondering if there
was a special way to start a python program (as opposed to an
arbitrary program), especially because I would like to pass data to
this other program in the form of python objects.

While the original program is running it creates all sorts of data in
a nice pythonic way, for example as a class instance with lot of
member data, and then I wouldn't want to convert all of this into
command line arguments because that would create a huge list. I would
like to pass the whole object at once to the second python program
which should start doing its thing with it while the original program
should keep running.

I was looking around for threading and forking but couldn't come up
with a clear solution.