Agreed.
> and communicating across processes often requires making expensive copies of data
SharedMemory [0] exists. Never understood why this isn’t used more frequently. There’s even a ShareableList which does exactly what it sounds like, and is awesome.
[0]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.shared_mem...
Can you throw a JSON-serializable data structure (lists, dict, strings, numbers) into SharedMemory? What about regular instance of random Python classes? If the answer is "no", that explains why it's not done more often.
The examples in the docs seem to pass byte strings and byte arrays around, which is far less convenient than regular data structures.
You can throw a JSON-serialized data structure into SharedMemory, sure, since you can store strings.
> The examples in the docs seem to pass byte strings and byte arrays around
The examples in the docs largely use ShareableList, which itself can contain any of int, float, bool, str, bytes, and None-type values.