@Prof Plum

> When I call pool.apply_async() I expect it only to return when the worker process has been started and finished it's initialization process

Well... it's called *async* for a reason, so I'm not sure why the behaviour would be partially synchronous.

@Oren

> Should we fix this?

I'm not sure how.  In mp.Pool we don't want to keep references to input objects longer than necessary.

> Or is it the responsibility of the user to not destroy shared objects too soon?  (In that case, maybe we should mention it in the docs?)

Yes to both questions, IMO.

(note: changing title to better reflect issue)