The new kid on the block in data freeze-thawing is Data::Denter and it does handle circular references perfectly.

I'm not sure why stringification is bad for you, but it does use a readable (indented) format for data dumping.

In reply to Re: Persistence and handling large amounts of multi-level self-referential data by princepawn
in thread Persistence and handling large amounts of multi-level self-referential data by premchai21

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