Why go through all that though? The fundamental principle is that it is flattening the buffer to one linear section of memory, making the pointers jump to a location that is likely already prefetched and possibly in the same cache line. Dumping to C seems like it is missing the point.

A library like Cereal should be able to do this almost trivially simply by serializing the data, unserializing it to a flat buffer, then pointing to the start of that buffer.

Also I should say that a random forest created by pointer hopping to each new level is a very naive implementation and will take a long time to create due to heap allocation and a long time to traverse due to cache misses.