I have a python interpreter embedded inside an application. The application takes a long time to start up and I have no ability to restart the interpreter without restarting the whole application. What I would like to do is to essentially save the state of the interpreter and return to that state easily.

I started by storing the names of all modules in sys.modules that the python interpreter started with and then deleting all new modules from sys.modules when requested. This appears to make the interpreter prepared to re-import the same modules even though it has already imported them before. However, this doesn't seem to work in all situations, such as using singleton classes and static methods, etc.

I'd rather not embed another interpreter inside this interpreter if it can be avoided, as the ease of being able to use the applications API will be lost (as well as including a slight speed hit I imagine).

So, does anyone know of a way I could store the interpreter's state and then return to this so that it can cope with all situations?

Thanks,

Dan

Try this code from ActiveState recipes: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/572213/

It extends pickle so it supports pickling anything defined in the shell console. Theoretically you should just be able to pickle the main module, according to their documentation:

import savestate, pickle, __main__
pickle.dump(__main__, open('savestate.pickle', 'wb'), 2)