It allows you to: * Pickle tracebacks and raise exceptions with pickled tracebacks in different processes. This allows better error handling when running code over multiple processes (imagine multiprocessing, billiard, futures, celery etc). * Create traceback objects from strings (the fromstring method). No pickling is used. * Serialize tracebacks to/from plain dicts (the fromdict and to_dict methods). No pickling is used. * Raise the tracebacks created from the aforementioned sources. * Pickle an Exception together with its traceback and exception chain (raise ... from ...) (Python 3 only) Again, note that using the pickle support is completely optional. You are solely responsible for security problems should you decide to use the pickle support.