hibernate-like saving state of a program

Question

Is there any way in C++ or Java or Python that would allow me to save the state of my program, no questions asked? For example, I've spent an hour learning how to save a tree-like structure into a file. Very educative but I feel I could just do:

saveState(file);

And the "file" would contain whole memory my program uses. Just like operating system's "hibernate" or "suspend-to-disk" feature. I know about boost serialization, this is probably not what I'm looking for.

Answer 1

What you most likely want is what we call serialization or object marshalling. There are a whole butt load of academic problems with data/object serialization that you can easily google.

That being said given the right library (probably very native) you could do a true snapshot of your running program similarly what "OS specific hibernate" does. Here is an SO answer for doing that on Linux: https://stackoverflow.com/a/12190830/318174

To do the above snapshot-ing though you will most likely need an external process from the process you want to save. I highly recommend you don't that. Instead read/lookup in your language of choice (btw welcome to SO, don't tag every language... that pisses people off) how to do serialization or object marshalling... hint... most people these days pick JSON.