Ah, I forgot capnproto doesn't let you edit a serialized proto in-memory, it's read-only. In theory this should be possible as long as you're not changing the length of anything, but I'm not surprised such trickery is unsupported.

So this doesn't seem like a versatile solution for sharing data structs between two Python processes. You're gonna have to reserialize the whole thing if one side wants to edit, which is basically copying.