On Oct 31, 3:31 am, "Evan Klitzke" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Can anyone elaborate more on the difference between marshal and > pickle. In what conditions would using marshal be unsafe? If one can > guarantee that the marshalled objects would be created and read by the > same version of Python, is that enough?
Yes, I think that's enough. I like to use marshal a lot because it's the absolutely fastest way to store and load data to/from Python. Furthermore because marshal is "stupid" the programmer has complete control. A lot of the overhead you get with the pickles which make them generally much slower than marshal come from the cleverness by which pickle will recognized shared objects and all that junk. When I serialize, I generally don't need that because I know what I'm doing. For example both gadfly SQL http://gadfly.sourceforge.net and nucular full text/fielded search http://nucular.sourceforge.net use marshal as the underlying serializer. Using cPickle would probably make serialization worse than 2x slower. This is one of the 2 or 3 key tricks which make these packages as fast as they are. -- Aaron Watters === http://www.xfeedme.com/nucular/gut.py/go?FREETEXT=halloween -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
