[strlen]

Question, how does this compare/contrast to “image based persistence” as used by e.g., most Smalltalk and certain Lisp based VMs?

[webmaven]

It is equivalent, as are the pre-XML MS Office file formats which were essentially dumps of the document in memory.

[strlen]

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and write(2)/WriteFile a struct to disk.”