Re: Time to drop the pre-dump phase in the build?

[Nix]

On 11 Jan 2014, Richard Stallman outgrape:
> 20 years ago we needed to port the dumping code to various different
> systems.  It was substantial work.  But it seems there have been no new
> such systems in a long time, and that code seems to be stable.

It still requires substantial ugly hacks, e.g. there is code in glibc to
serialize and deserialize malloc state whose sole purpose is to support
Emacs dumping, and which cannot be changed since that would force Emacs
to be redumped when glibc was upgraded. It seems plausible that this
might eventually retard glibc allocator development :(

XEmacs long ago migrated to a 'portable undumper', whereby (IIRC) the
Lisp heap is serialized into a form that is then mmap()ed in at startup
time (using a separate file, so unexec() is no longer necessary). It was
a lot of work, but doing something similar might be worth considering in
the future anyway.

-- 
NULL && (void)