No way to peek window configurations? Any way to restore them after restarting Emacs?

[Ken Hori <fplemma@gmail.com>]

I was just reading the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual to see if
Emacs provided any way of restoring window configurations when
Emacs had to restart itself due to some unfortunate crash or for
whatever other reasons.

Restoring a window configuration on a live Emacs is very easy:

(setq winconf (current-window-configuration))
... do whatever you like ...
(set-window-configuration winconf)

I also understand that some information may get lost (like how to
get e.g. an eshell buffer) once Emacs is closed.

But if Emacs provided a way to access what are inside window
configurations, most stuff can be restored.

However, the manual states:
  Other primitives to look inside of window configurations would
  make sense, but are not implemented because we did not need them.

So there is currently no way to peek the contents of window configuration.

I do not know what the author of the sentence meant by "we" above
exactly, but wouldn't it be useful to be able to access winconf
contents, as it would give Emacs capabilities somewhat similar to
"workspace" in IDEs?

If we can't use window configuration, what are the alternatives
for that purpose?

Thanks.