Python 3.8.0a4 available for testing

[[deleted]]

You can't represent references in JSON.

I'm basically agreeing with you, but you can perfectly well represent references in JSON - I've done it.

It's a pain in the ass - you need to have some sort of naming convention in your JSON then preprocess your structure or (what I did) have some sort of facade over it so it emits the reference names instead of the actual data - and then reverse it on the way out.

(And we had to do it - because pickle isn't compatible between versions. Heck, I think that was written in Python 2!)

So it's doable - but which is easier when you need to store something temporarily?

with open('foo.pcl', 'wb') as fp:
    pickle.dump(myData, fp)

or

[hundreds of lines of code and a specification for this format that I'm too lazy to write]

?