emacs and some of the TeX programs worked that way. Maybe they still do. I haven't looked at that in a quarter century.
To elaborate: the programs would do all of their initialization and loading of things that would be used in any run, then dump themselves. The result of undump was an executable that had already done all of its boilerplate loading and was ready to process its arguments and inputs. It was bigger, since it had a bunch of heap stored, but it was better than hammering away on your CPU at 1 million instructions per second.
Re:Very funny, gdb. Ve-ery funny
by eliasmacpherson on Sunday January 12, 2014 @09:15AM
(#7046044)
That's pretty cool. Is there a way of making a java program do this? The JVM startup time on a desktop kills me.
Java Web start or similar. It was called TSR in the DOS world "terminate and stay resident".
Isn't that how they used to build emacs, there was some multistage bootstrapping procedure that culminated in undump'ing a thing that got turned into a binary.