Technical choices in unmarshalling hash-consed data

Question

There seems to be quite a bit of folklore knowledge floating about in restricted circles about the pitfalls of hash-consing combined with marshalling-unmarshalling of data. I am looking for citable references to these tidbits.

For instance, someone once pointed me to library aterm and mentioned that the authors had clearly thought about this and that the representation on disk was bottom-up (children of a node come before the node itself in the data stream). This is indeed the right way to do things when you need to re-share each node (with a possible identical node already in memory). This re-sharing pass needs to be done bottom-up, so the unmarshalling itself might as well be, too, so that it's possible to do everything in a single pass.

I am in the process of describing difficulties encountered in our own context, and the solutions we found. I would appreciate any citable reference to the kind of aforementioned folklore knowledge. Some people obviously have encountered the problems before (the aterm library is only one example). But I didn't find anything in writing. Even the little piece of information I have about aterm is hear-say. I am not worried it's not reliable (you can't make this up), but "personal communication" and "look how it's done in the source code" are considered poor form in citations.

I have enough references on hash-consing alone. I am only interested in references where it interferes with other aspects of programming, such as marshalling or distribution.

Answer 1

I found one reference on marshalling in functional languages; not sure if it will be useful, but the authors are smart: http://tinyurl.com/yc3hob9

I believe that Matthias Blume and/or Andrew Appel did something on this, but I can't find the paper. I also believe I reviewed something once for the Journal of Functional Programming, but I can't remember if the paper was accepted or who wrote it.

I suggest you ask Matthias Blume, Andrew Appel, and Phil Wadler if they can help.