That sounds like less than two weeks of work, maybe even if we add the marshal module to it.<br>
In less than a month of GSoC time, this could easily reach a point where<br>
it's "close to the speed of what we have" and "fast enough", but a lot more<br>
accessible and maintainable, thus also making it easier to add the<br>
extensions described in the PEP.<br>
<br>
What do you think?</blockquote><div><br></div><div>As others have pointed out, many users of pickle depend on its performance. The main reason why _pickle.c is so big is all the low-level optimizations we have in there. We have custom stack and dictionary implementations just for the sake of speed. We also have fast paths for I/O operations and function calls. These optimizations alone are taking easily 2000 lines of code and they are not micro-optimizations. Each of these were shown to give speedups from one to several orders of magnitude.</div>
<div><br></div><div>So I disagree that we could easily reach the point where it's "close to the speed of what we have." And if we were to attempt this, it would be a multiple months undertaking. I would rather see that time spent on improving pickle than on yet another reimplementation. </div>