[TUHS] Emacs and undump

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Tim Bradshaw wrote:
>> David wrote:
>> I remember that GNU Emacs launched the first time and then dumped
>> itself out as a core file. Each subsequent launch would then ‘undump’
>> itself back into memory. All this because launching emacs the first
>> time required compiling all that lisp code.
> It still works like that.  Indeed that's the conventional way that
> Lisp systems tend to work for delivering applications

Emacs came from ITS, and many Lisps derive from Maclisp which also came
from ITS.  In ITS, it was common for applications to be dumped into a
loadable core image, even if they were written in assembly language.