Comment by smacke

Pickling + unpickling the object is a neat trick to update objects to point to the new methods, but it's even more straightforward to just patch `obj.__class__ = reloaded_module.NewClass`. This is what ipython's autoreload extension used to do (and still does in some circumstances, along with other tricks to patch up old references), though nowadays it's had some improvements over this approach: https://github.com/ipython/ipython/pull/14500