On 01/18/2016 12:02 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
>> Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2016 11:50:31 -0800
>>
>> Emacs could live without the current unexec in a semi-portable way by doing what 
>> XEmacs does, which is to write out data and mmap it in later (sorry, don't know 
>> the details). There are other possibilities, e.g., have unexec write out the 
>> state in the form of C files that are compiled and linked in the usual way to 
>> build a faster-starting executable (this would be an Emacs API change, though). 
>> Any such changes would take some time to hack into something reliable and 
>> portable, and so will have to wait until after Emacs 25 is out.
> 
> There's also what the MS-Windows port does (temacs allocates off a
> static array), which AFAIK is entirely portable, and doesn't require
> mmap.  See w32heap.c.
> 

It's a portable stopgap, maybe, but a real portable dumper would be
_much_ better, since then Emacs could be a much safer
position-independnent executable (as a portable dumper would relocate
the dump as it loads, since it knows where all the pointers are).