pickle causes Immediate segfault about rtree HOT 4 CLOSED

The issue here is that if an instance doesn't override getstate and setstate, the pickler defaults to pickling the instance's dict (the mapping of all attributes to values). If you look at what ends up in the serialized pickle, you'll quickly see that it includes the handle attribute, which is a pointer to an object allocated with libspatialindex.

This will cause problems when the Index is garbage collected, as the Index's del method frees the underlying object. You're seeing the segfault because of this (essentially a double free).

The solution is to implement custom getstate and setstate methods...or to not try to pickle Index objects. Your use case is a little unclear, since rtree supports its own storage mechanism for serialiazing and deserializing the data structures.

Even if there are no plans to make Index objects pickle-able, it would be nice not to segfault here, and instead raise an exception.

from rtree.

I would happily merge a PR on this issue.

from rtree.

To implement pickling, or to simply prevent the segfault by throwing an exception instead in getstate and setstate?

from rtree.

Ideally getting to the former, but the latter is a good start.

from rtree.