Re: Preview: portable dumper

[Daniel Colascione]

On Tue, Nov 29 2016, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
>> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden
>> Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2016 11:48:40 -0500
>> 
>>   > Frame and window objects come back dead after being restored from the 
>> dump.
>> 
>> Can that be fixed by creating new equivalent windows and frames?
>
> I'm actually wondering why frames and windows (and buffers, for that
> matter) need to be dumped at all.  The fact we do that now is just an
> artifact of how unexec works: it dumps the entire data section.  We
> even have special code that runs at startup to undo some of the
> peculiarities this causes.
>
> However, a dumper that we control by manually telling it what to dum
> and what not doesn't have to do that.  IMO, that's just something that
> doesn't need to exist in the brave new unexec-free world.  (Note that
> the "one huge .elc file" method has this built-in.)

Frames and windows aren't dumped. That's why they come back as
dead objects. Lisp objects have to point to *something*, and a dead
object of the right type is a good placeholder.