What can I say. Storable does not, and could not¹ provide the facility you are asking for, so I offered you a possible solution.

¹ What you are asking for would require Storable to scan the entire in-memory image of your running application locating all global, localised and my'd (pad) storage areas looking for structures that resemble that being thawed(). Not only would this be extremely difficult, if not impossible, it would also be extremely slow and ultimately unreliable as you could never be sure that the calling program would be aware that it was holding two pointers to the same data, or even that the two pointers were originally pointing to the same data. This would lead to the situation of the caller modifying one object and inadvertantly altering another without realising it.

However, if all the datastructures are (or were made) objects of the same class (or of derived classes), then you could wrap that around Storable, tie the structures and use the additional knowledge you would have of the implementation to set up cache hash as I described.

I never suggested Storable should provide this. All I wanted was a way to do what I wanted in my code when STORABLE_thaw() was called. And I found it. It simply meant swapping the reference at the C level rather than the Perl level, because Storable is calling STORABLE_thaw() from C.