Archive for Python

Why you cannot pickle generators

Joseph Turian wrote a post about regarding pickling generator on his blog. In his post, he says:

However, generators become problematic when you want to persist your experiment’s state in order to later restart training at the same place. Unfortunately, you can’t pickle generators in Python. And it can be a bit of a PITA to workaround this, in order to save the training state.

This caught my attention, because I was involved in the decision, he cites, to not allow generators to be pickled in CPython. Although Joseph’s examples are a bit convoluted, it is pretty clear why his generators cannot be pickled automatically—i.e., Python cannot pickle the operating system’s state, like file descriptors.

Let’s ignore that problem for a moment and look what we would need to do to pickle a generator. Since a generator is essentially a souped-up function, we would need to save its bytecode, which is not guarantee to be backward-compatible between Python’s versions, and its frame, which holds the state of the generator such as local variables, closures and the instruction pointer. And this latter is rather cumbersome to accomplish, since it basically requires to make the whole interpreter picklable. So, any support for pickling generators would require a large number of changes to CPython’s core.

Now if an object unsupported by pickle (e.g., a file handle, a socket, a database connection, etc) occurs in the local variables of a generator, then that generator could not be pickled automatically, regardless of any pickle support for generators we might implement. So in that case, you would still need to provide custom __getstate__ and __setstate__ methods. This problem renders any pickling support for generators rather limited.

Anyway, if you need for a such feature, then look into Stackless Python which does all the above. And since Stackless’s interpreter is picklable, you also get process migration for free. This means you can interrupt a tasklet (the name for Stackless’s green threads), pickle it, send the pickle to a another machine, unpickle it, resume the tasklet, and voilà you’ve just migrated a process. This is freaking cool feature!

But in my humble opinion, the best solution to this problem to the rewrite the generators as simple iterators (i.e., one with a __next__ method). Iterators are easy and efficient space-wise to pickle because their state is explicit. You would still need to handle objects representing some external state explicitly however; you cannot get around this.

Porting your code to Python 3

See the plain HTML version.

The following is a write-up of the presentation I gave to a group of Python developers at Montreal Python 5 on February 26th. This is basically a HTML-fied copy of the notes I prepared before the presentation. I haven’t done editing, so expect a few grammar mistakes there and there. My complete presentation slides are available here. A video was taped should be released in the upcoming weeks (I will post a link here when I finally get my hands on it). Please note that if you’re looking for more complete guide about Python 3 (and more accurate), I highly recommend that you read the What’s New In Python 3.0 document and the Python Enhancement Proposals numbered above 3000.

You may wonder why we did Python 3 afterall. The motivation was simple: to fix old warts and to clean up the language before it was too late. Python 3 is not complete rewrite of Python; it still pretty much the good old Python you all love. But I am not going to lie. There are many changes in Python 3; many that will cause pain when you will port your code; and so many that I won’t be able to cover them all in this talk. That is why I will focus only on the changes that will need to know to port your code. If you want to learn about all new and shiny features, you will need to visit the python.org’s website and the online documentation of Python 3.

In the second part of this presentation, I will go over the steps needed to port a real library to Python 3. Hopefully, this part will give you a basic knowledge and tools to tackle the problems linked to the migration.

Finally, I will give you an insider’s view of the upcoming changes in Python 3.1, which suppose to be released later this year.

Read the rest of this entry…

Summer of Code Weekly #4

All is well for me and my project. I finished the merge of cStringIO and StringIO, and I am now moving to the more challenging cPickle/pickle merge. During the last two weeks, I mostly spend my time analyzing the pickle module and thinking how I will clean up cPickle. My current plan is:

  1. Make cPickle’s source code conform to PEP-7.
  2. Remove the dependency on the now obsolete cStringIO.
  3. Benchmark cPickle and pickle.
  4. Add subclassing support to Pickler/Unpickler.
  5. Reduce the size of cPickle’s source code based on the bottlenecks found by the benchmarks.

Hopefully, cPickle/pickle merge will be as smooth (and as fun) as the cStringIO/StringIO merge.

Pickle: An interesting stack language

The pickle module provides a convenient method to add data persistence to your Python programs. How it does that, is pure magic to most people. However, in reality, it is simple. The output of a pickle is a “program” able to create Python data-structures. A limited stack language is used to write these programs. By limited, I mean you can’t write anything fancy like a for-loop or an if-statement. Yet, I found it interesting to learn. That is why I would like to share my little discovery.

Throughout this post, I use a simple interpreter to load pickle streams. Just copy-and-paste the following code in a file:

import code
import pickle
import sys

sys.ps1 = "pik> "
sys.ps2 = "...> "
banner = "Pik -- The stupid pickle loader.\nPress Ctrl-D to quit."

class PikConsole(code.InteractiveConsole):
    def runsource(self, source, filename="<stdin>"):
        if not source.endswith(pickle.STOP):
            return True  # more input is needed
        try:
            print repr(pickle.loads(source))
        except:
            self.showsyntaxerror(filename)
        return False

pik = PikConsole()
pik.interact(banner)

Then, launch it with Python:

$ python pik.py
Pik -- The stupid pickle loader.
Press Ctrl-D to quit.
pik>

So, nothing crazy yet. The easiest objects to create are the empty ones. For example, to create an empty list:

pik> ].
[]

Similarly, you can also create a dictionary and a tuple:

pik> }.
{}
pik> ).
()

Remark that every pickle stream ends with a period. That symbol pops the topmost object from the stack and returns it. So, let’s say you pile up a series of integers and end the stream. Then, the result will be last item you entered:

pik> I1
...> I2
...> I3
...> .
3

As you see, an integer starts with the symbol ‘I’ and end with a newline. Strings, and floating-point number are represented in a similar fashion:

pik> F1.0
...> .
1.0
pik> S'abc'
...> .
'abc'
pik> Vabc
...> .
u'abc'

Now that you know the basics, we can move to something slightly more complex — constructing compound objects. As you will see later, tuples are everywhere in Python, so let’s begin with that one:

pik> (I1
...> S'abc'
...> F2.0
...> t.
(1, 'abc', 2.0)

There is two new symbols in this example, ‘(‘ and ‘t’. The ‘(‘ is simply a marker. It is a object in the stack that tells the tuple builder, ‘t’, when to stop. The tuple builder pops items from the stack until it reaches a marker. Then, it creates a tuple with these items and pushes this tuple back on the stack. You can use multiple markers to construct a nested tuple:

pik> (I1
...> (I2
...> I3
...> tt.
(1, (2, 3))

You use a similar method to build a list or a dictionary:

pik> (I0
...> I1
...> I2
...> l.
[0, 1, 2]
pik> (S'red'
...> I00
...> S'blue'
...> I01
...> d.
{'blue': True, 'red': False}

The only difference is that dictionary items are packed by key/value pairs. Note that I slipped in the symbols for True and False, which looks like the integers 0 and 1, but with an extra zero.

Like tuples, you can nest lists and dictionaries:

pik> ((I1
...> I2
...> t(I3
...> I4
...> ld.
{(1, 2): [3, 4]}

There is another method for creating lists or dictionaries. Instead of using a marker to delimit a compound object, you create an empty one and add stuff to it:

pik> ]I0
...> aI1
...> aI2
...> a.
[0, 1, 2]

The symbols ‘a’ means “append”. It pops an item and a list; appends the item to the list; and finally, pushes the list back on the stack. Here how you do a nested list with this method:

pik> ]I0
...> a]I1
...> aI2
...> aa.
[0, [1, 2]]

If this is not cryptic enough for you, consider this:

pik> (lI0
...> a(lI1
...> aI2
...> aa.
[0, [1, 2]]

Instead of using the empty list symbol, ‘]’, I used a marker immediately followed by a list builder to create an empty list. That is the notation the Pickler object uses, by default, when dumping objects.

Like lists, dictionaries can be constructed using a similar method:

pik> }S'red'
...> I1
...> sS'blue'
...> I2
...> s.
{'blue': 2, 'red': 1}

However, to set items to a dictionary you use the symbol ‘s’, not ‘a’. Unlike ‘a’, it takes a key/value pair instead of a single item.

You can build recursive data-structures, too:

pik> (Vzoom
...> lp0
...> g0
...> a.
[u'zoom', [...]]

The trick is to use a “register” (or as called in pickle, a memo). The ‘p’ symbol (for “put”) copies the top item of the stack in a memo. Here, I used ’0′ for the name of the memo, but it could have been anything. To get the item back, you use the symbol ‘g’. It will copy an item from a memo and put it on top of the stack.

But, what about sets? Now, we have a small problem, since there is no special notation for building sets. The only way to build a set is to call the built-in function set() on a list (or a tuple):

pik> c__builtin__
...> set
...> ((S'a'
...> S'a'
...> S'b'
...> ltR.
set(['a', 'b'])

There is a few new things here. The ‘c’ symbol retrieves an object from a module and puts it on the stack. And the reduce symbol, ‘R’, apply a tuple to a function. Same semantic again, ‘R’ pops a tuple and a function from the stack, then pushes the result back on it. So, the above example is roughly the equivalent of the following in Python:

>>> import __builtin__
>>> apply(__builtin__.set, (['a', 'a', 'b'],))

Or, using the star notation:

>>> __builtin__.set(*(['a', 'a', 'b'],))

And, that is the same thing as writing:

>>> set(['a', 'a', 'b'])

Or shorter even, using the set notation from the upcoming Python 3000:

>>> {'a', 'a', 'b'}

These two new symbols, ‘t’ and ‘R’, allows us to execute arbitrary code from the standard library. So, you must be careful to never load untrusted pickle streams. Someone malicious could easily slip in the stream a command to delete your data. Meanwhile, you can use that power for something less evil, like launching a clock:

pik> cos
...> system
...> (S'xclock'
...> tR.

Even if the language doesn’t support looping directly, that doesn’t stop you from using the implicit loops:

pik> c__builtin__
...> map
...> (cmath
...> sqrt
...> c__builtin__
...> range
...> (I1
...> I10
...> tRtR.
[1.0, 1.4142135623730951, 1.7320508075688772, 2.0, 2.2360679774997898,
2.4494897427831779, 2.6457513110645907, 2.8284271247461903, 3.0]

I am sure you could you fake an if-statement by defining it as a function, and then load it from a module.

def my_if(cond, then_val, else_val):
    if cond:
        return then_val
    else:
        return else_val

That works well for simple cases:

>>> my_if(True, 1, 0)
1
>>> my_if(False, 1, 0)
0

However, you run into some problems if mix that with recursion:

>>> def factorial(n):
...     return my_if(n == 1,
...                  1, n * factorial(n - 1))
...
>>> factorial(2)
RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded in cmp

On the other hand, I don’t think you really want to create recursive pickle streams, unless you want to win an obfuscated code contest.

That is about all I had to say about this simple stack language. There is a few things haven’t told you about, but I sure you will be able figure them out. Just read the source code of the pickle module. And, take a look at the pickletools module, which provides a disassembler for pickle streams. As always, comments are welcome.

Summer of Code Weekly #3

During this third week of the Summer of Code, I found very difficult to concentrate on my work — I been a lightbulb instead of a laser. The result was little code done. On the other hand, I learned a lot about other things. For example, I now finally understand assembly language; how to use gdb; the basics of the design of the Linux kernel; etc, etc.

I also read the book “Producing Open Source Software”, by Karl Fogel. It is really good primer to the world of free software. If you have a burning desire to contribute open source projects, just like me, I highly recommend that you get your own copy, or read it online.

Summer of Code Weekly #2

I can confirm it now, this second week of coding was even better. It was harder on my brain cells, though. I am mostly done with the StringIO merge. I now have working implementations in C of the BytesIO and the StringIO objects. The only thing remaining to do, for these two modules, is polishing the unit tests. And that shouldn’t that me very long to do. So, in basically one week of work, I completed the merge of cStringIO. I am certainly proud of that.

Now, I will need to attack the cPickle and cProfile modules. I don’t know yet which I work on first. cPickle still seems very scary to me, and unlike cStringIO it’s huge. It’s about five or six times bigger. cProfile, on the other hand, is about the same size of cStringIO and well documented. I even wonder if I need to code anything for cProfile. It will be a piece of cake to merge. Now, one question remains: should I take the cake now, or keep it for the end?

Summer of Code Weekly #1

During this summer, I will post each week a short summary of what I did, the challenges I encountered and what I learned during my Summer of Code project. I am doing this for helping me to keep track of my progresses.

So how was my first week? It was great. I don’t know why but I love programming in C. It is just plain fun. I thought learning Python C API was going to be hard, but it is quite easy after all. I just read the code in Python itself and check the reference manual for the things I don’t know. My biggest surprise, this week, was really learning how to do subclassable types. It is strikingly easy, however it’s quite verbose. You can look at my scratch extension module, if you want a minimal working example.

Other than learning the C API, I started working on the cStringIO/StringIO merge. My current plan is to separate the cStringIO module into two private submodules, _bytes_io and _string_io. One will be for bytes literals (ASCII), and the other for Unicode. This will reflect the changes made to the I/O subsystem in Python 3000. These two submodules will provide optional implementations for the speed-critical methods, like .read() and .write().

One the best things, of this week, was the great feedback I got from other Python developers, and particularly from my mentor Brett Cannon, who cheerfully answers all my questions. Now, I just hope the following week will be as fun, or even more, as this one.

Smoked brains for dinner

Today, there will be a special quiz on Python hosted by me, in #ubuntu-trivia on FreeNode, at 20:00 UTC. Most of the quiz will be to write some simple procedures, faster than your opponents. The winner will, of course, get a superb prize — 5 Ubuntu stickers! Obviously, the real prize is the fun that will get during the quiz. And who knows, maybe you will learn a few neat tricks. So, see you there!

Boosted Python Startup

Yesterday, I was reading Peter Norvig’s excellent article about spell checking. Then, I started to look to some of his older stuff. So, I found his Python IAQ (Infrequently Answered Questions), and discovered a pretty neat trick:

h = [None]  # history

class Prompt:
    """A prompt a history mechanism.
    From http://www.norvig.com/python-iaq.html
    """
    def __init__(self, prompt='h[%d] >>> '):
        self.prompt = prompt

    def __str__(self):
        try:
            if _ not in h: h.append(_)
        except NameError:
            pass
        return self.prompt % len(h)

    def __radd__(self, other):
        return str(other) + str(self)

sys.ps1 = Prompt()
sys.ps2 = '     ... '

This improve the interactive prompt of Python with a shell-like history mechanism. With this prompt, you can reuse any previous value returned by Python. For example:

h[1] >>> lambda x: x * 2
<function <lambda> at 0xb7dab41c>
h[2] >>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
h[3] >>> map(h[1], h[2])
[2, 4, 6, 8, 10]

You can make it your default prompt, by adding the above in your .pythonrc.py. You will need to specify its location to Python with the environment variable PYTHONSTARTUP. Just add something like the following to your shell configuration (e.g., .bashrc or .zshrc).

export PTHONSTARTUP="$HOME/.pythonrc.py"

I am sure there is a ton of other useful modifications, which can be done with the startup file of Python. If you’re interested, here my brand new startup file. And if you know any other cool tricks for Python, please tell me!

Flipping bits this summer

Dear Applicant, Congratulations! This email is being sent to inform you that your application was accepted to take part in the Summer of Code.

Today, I am truly happy. I wasn’t expecting to be accepted, really, and perhaps no other candidate did. My accepted project is to merge C and Python implementations of the same interface (i.e., StringIO/cStringIO, Pickle/cPickle, etc), and my mentor is the Python star developer, Brett Cannon. This will be a challenging project; I will have to work hard and efficiently to be successful. But one thing is sure, I will have some great fun.

I would like to congrats everyone who have been accepted. A special thanks to students who will be working on Ubuntu, this summer. There is surely some great projects for Ubuntu. And also, another special thanks to the mentors, who will be helping us this summer.