How to marshal a function?

[Michael Hudson]

pinard at iro.umontreal.ca (François Pinard) writes:

> Earlier today, I wondered how to marshal a function, in view of
> transmitting it to a remote machine and executing it there.  The
> idea was to not transmit Python source, when the byte-compilation
> has already been done on this side.
> 
> I quickly found out that, for a given `function f(...) ...' I should
> transmit marshal-ed `f.func_code' instead of `f'.  The resulting
> code could even be eval'ed or exec'ed on the remote side, if the
> function does not require arguments.  I did not saw that I could
> usefully return something from the function, and surely many other
> properties are missing.  Moreover, the manual suggests that this is
> all internal things, subject to change at any time.  The result of
> marshal-ing is not guaranteed to work between Python versions,
> either.

Well, the bytecode has changed between every released version of
Python, AFAIK.  Certainly 1.5.2->2.0, 2.0->2.1 and 2.1->2.2, and not
usually backward compatibly.

So you can forget that idea.

Cheers,
M.

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