Generic Pickling and Minimization

This paper presents generic pickling and minimization mechanisms that are provided as services similar to garbage collection. Pickling is used to externalize and internalize data. Minimization means to maximize the sharing in arbitrary data structures. The paper introduces the notion of an abstract store as a formal basis for the algorithms, and analyzes design decisions for the implementation aspects of pickling and minimization. The mechanisms presented here are fully implemented in the Alice programming system.