The Emacs dumper dispute

I also object as a matter of principle to the idea that we should forgive long startup times generally and paper over the delays by structuring every application as a client-server system. What if *everyone* did this? We'd live in a world where no program you ran would ever really leave memory. It's an incredible waste of system resources. Plus, with client-server setups, it's hard to get things like security, environment variable propagation, reliable daemon restarts, process priority, file descriptor inheritance, etc. right, and everyone who writes one of these daemon systems has to deal with these fiddly issues alone.

You could argue that dumping is also papering over performance problems, but at least dumping does so in a way that doesn't have negative global performance implications. I wish kernel-level checkpoint and restart were widely available: if the system managed the dumping instead of individual processes like Emacs having to do this work, we'd be better off.