[Soot-list] Is there any way to get Soot to save the jimplified representations of the classes?

[Chris Pickett]

On Tue, March 28, 2006 8:03 pm, Rhodes H. F. Brown wrote:
>>> And, is it possible to cache the JimpleBody through, say,
>>> ObjectOutputStream, that I can load it from file in the future?
>>>
>
> I think you might run in to trouble attempting this. Most Soot
> constructs seem to implement Serializable, however a cursory inspection
> reveals that some probably aren't really serializable. For example,
> soot.Type has a member arrayType (of type soot.ArrayType) which has a
> member baseType. Clearly this creates a circular reference pattern that
> cannot be deserialized without special treatment (and there is none).

And, also, please note that if you *do* want to fix Soot to support
serialization robustly and want to contribute your patch, it is very
likely to get approved, since Soot startup times are a concern for every
user.  In my opinion, nobody has fixed it yet because there is little real
benefit to research, i.e. you can't really publish anything about it if
you get it working.  I also think though that doing it would be a good
programming exercise and would teach you a lot about Soot, and in fact
that would probably be the largest benefit to the implementor.

Cheers,
Chris