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Removing support for Emacs unexec from Glibc

Removing support for Emacs unexec from Glibc

Posted Jan 29, 2016 4:31 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
In reply to: Removing support for Emacs unexec from Glibc by JanC_
Parent article: Removing support for Emacs unexec from Glibc

Back then there weren't many slow-starting applications - computers were slower but we expected them to be faster! (Today they are extremely fast be we have become used to their inevitable sluggishness).

There were only two applications that were useful enough to get away with being bloated: emacs and TeX. Both used the same "unexec" trick, though probably different implementations.


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Removing support for Emacs unexec from Glibc

Posted Jan 29, 2016 8:08 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (1 responses)

The TeX implementation is much like the proposed approach of making a big data table out of what has been loaded in temacs, although that's less special in Pascal (what TeX is written in) than C. In Pascal, you can't have storage which can be cast between pointers and non-pointers, so TeX pretty much doesn't use pointers and instead has indexes into a large integer array; dumping that array and loading it into a different process isn't nearly as messy as trying to save a C heap with pointers or transforming a C heap into an array without pointers.

Removing support for Emacs unexec from Glibc

Posted Jan 29, 2016 8:19 UTC (Fri) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link]

On the other hand, these arrays cause other major problems. Fun like "TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [number of strings=245828]" etc...


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