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I’m considering the idea of creating a persistent storage like a dbms engine, what would be the benefits to create a custom binary format over directly cPickling the object and/or using the shelve module?
Pickling is a two-face coin.
On one side, you have a way to store your object in a very easy way. Just four lines of code and you pickle. You have the object exactly as it is.
On the other side, it can become a compatibility nightmare. You cannot unpickle objects if they are not defined in your code, exactly as they were defined when pickled. This strongly limits your ability to refactor the code, or rearrange stuff in your modules.
Also, not everything can be pickled, and if you are not strict on what gets pickled and the client of your code has full freedom of including any object, sooner or later it will pass something unpicklable to your system, and the system will go boom.
Be very careful about its use. there’s no better definition of quick and dirty.