Friday 12:10 p.m.–12:55 p.m.

Pickles are for Delis, not Software

Alex Gaynor

Audience level:
Intermediate
Category:
Python Core (language, stdlib, etc.)

Description

You may have encountered the pickle or cPickle libraries, and used them to persist some state about your program. But how do they work? This talk explores how the pickle protocol works, what its advantages are, and its disadvantages

Abstract

You may have used the pickle standard library module. But do you know how it works? This talk will introduce you to how pickle is implemented, and what some of the major problems with its approach are. Well deconstruct and rebuild the pickle library from the ground up, to understand why it has serious repercussions for your application's security and maintainability, Finally we'll look at some alternate approaches to serialization.