What's fundamentally unworkable -- serialization?? There are plenty of options in Python -- pickle, JSON (no graphs), or protocol buffers/thrift if you want something language agnostic.
Having a serialization layer in distributed applications is a pretty vanilla requirement... I am also confused about the "unworkable" comment.
The "multiprocessing" module (which I have heard some not-so-good things about) automatically serializes Python objects over byte streams using pickle or some such thing.
Serialization is very expansive compared to shared data structures. Even if not everybody is affected by that, it still makes serialization unsuitable as a general solution in this case.
Aha! That sounds like just the ticket. I hope it's easy to use. A million thank-you's, and a Salami.
EDIT: I just saw your edit. That's what I'm doing --- shm_open(), ftruncate(), then mmap(). A little annoying that it doesn't automatically kill the shared memory when the program terminates, but still...
Well, the Protobuf PyPI package (which is two versions out of date) has not been able to be installed by Pip for over 3 years now. And yes, this is a known bug.
Having a serialization layer in distributed applications is a pretty vanilla requirement... I am also confused about the "unworkable" comment.
The "multiprocessing" module (which I have heard some not-so-good things about) automatically serializes Python objects over byte streams using pickle or some such thing.