On preserving term sharing in the Erlang virtual machine
Nikolaos Papaspyrou, Konstantinos Sagonas · 2012
In programming language implementations, one of the most important design decisions concerns the underlying representation of terms. In functional languages with immutable terms, the runtime system can choose to preserve sharing of subterms or destroy sharing and expand terms to their flattened representation during certain key operations. Both options have pros and cons. The implementation of Erlang in the Erlang/OTP system from Ericsson has so far opted for an implementation where sharing of subterms is not preserved when terms are copied (e.g., when sent from one process to another or when used as arguments in spawns).