[erlang-questions] Question about Erlang's term serialization for message passing

[Bob Ippolito]

On 3/6/07, Christoph Dornheim <cd5@REDACTED> wrote:
> Taavi Talvik <taavi <at> uninet.ee> writes:
>
> >
> > Erlang does not have any "hidden in-memory pointer structure" at all.
> > As far
> > as I understand (i am in no way erlang guru) only receiving of values is
> > defined semantically. There are no "object graphs" in erlang. Only
> > values as
> > ints, floats, pids, references, ports, lists etc.
> >
> > Message size optimization probably can be implemented as implementation
> > specific optimization. With hybrid heap it probably is implemented as
> > such.
> >
> > But it is still optimization detail, which should be invisible on
> > language definition level.
> >
> > best regards,
> > taavi
> >
> >
>
> At the language level, all data are values, but at the implementation level data
> is built up by pointers to memory locations; so an Erlang term is internally
> represented by a graph-like pointer structure. E.g. when creating a new list
> L'=[a|L] from some list L their internal representations share memory since,
> internally, L' has a pointer to L.
>
> See also http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.erlang.general/16122/

Does it really matter though? It sounds very implementation dependent.
If you're trying to reduce identical terms for transfer you're
probably going to do pretty well just using term_to_binary/2 with
compression.

If you're trying to minimize memory consumption you ought to be using
data structures that have that property (independent of VM specific
optimizations) in the first place.

-bob