On the ESP8266, because it’s all in Python, the code is similar. In fact, the same basic code would work between two computers running vanilla Python just as well as the ESP8266 running MicroPython.

It all started with wanting to program an ESP-12 variant of an ESP8266 module without involving any solder. Displeased with all the socket offerings on Thingiverse, [tweeto] set out to design their… ...

The only time to pickle something is if you need to represent a non-string object on disk, but Python code is strings. I presume that the receiving program is basically calling eval (skt.recv ()).