(Beware, rambling coder text ahead)
I'd be tempted to work out a data structure to store the suffix trie / patricia trie in a structure that didn't rely on actual pointers (i.e. make it so it can be referenced from where-ever it is loaded into memory ... relocatable).
That way you can just build the data structure once, dump it to disk, then re-load it and use that. The interesting part will be working out how to then add to it (I'm assuming you'll need to).
Have you thought about using bit-sets at each trie node rather than a series of pointers? It'll be far more compact in memory if you can do that.
Have a look at this:
And see if it helps any.
( is *great* for research like this since the the other reference site went belly-up .. can't even remember what that one was called now).
Cheers,
Refractor
