Motivation

Consider using gob in the following scenario

type A struct {
    BVal *B
    CVal *C
}
type B struct {
    CVal *C
}
type C int

var originalC C = 3
originalB := &B{CVal: &originalC}
originalA := A{BVal: originalB, CVal: &originalC}

newA := **Serialize and Deserialize with gob**(originalA)

CVal in originalA is pointing to the same address as CVal in originalB. However, CVal in newA and newB would be a copy of each other without sharing the same address. It would be nice if the references are preserved when serializing.

Justification

Preservation of these references will be useful when using gob on data structures relying on the object tree. These could be indexes to data, efficient storage of data, etc. There will sometimes be the need to persists these data structures to disk or transmit them to another go runtime, most conveniently performed with gob. It could also potentially reduce payload of the serialized data as repetitions could be omitted.