Re: compiled lisp file format (Re: Skipping unexec via a big .elc file)

[Paul Eggert]

Ken Raeburn wrote:

> And I wouldn’t describe Guile’s “ELF everywhere” approach as entirely 
> platform-neutral.

That's correct. It's more portable than what Emacs currently does, but it's less 
portable than saving state in .elc format.

> Even saving just the Lisp state as with “dumped.elc”, I think there could be 
> state from the environment or build options that varies across distributions.

Yes, quite true. Even with "dumped .elc" or with any of the other methods 
proposed, it would be quite difficult to make the saved state portable to any 
platform. That kind of portability should not be our goal.

> If we want standardized object/executable format specifically for the preloaded 
> environment, perhaps using the native format by way of the C compiler is a 
> better choice.  I think this may have come up in the discussion before.  The 
> big loss there is the ability to create a new saved environment without having 
> a C compiler handy, but it seems like a thing few people are likely to want to 
> do, and even fewer non-developers who might not be able to install a compiler.

Yes, this is my preferred solution too; I was the one who made that suggestion. 
Although Eli didn't like the idea at the time, perhaps there will come a day 
when we revisit it. It should be faster than even Guile's ELF-based loading, 
which is already plenty fast.