> But loading these files with it to “dump” the Emacs binary? The only time I’ve heard of that was when reading a discussion about creating “executables” with

> But loading these files with it to “dump” the Emacs binary? The only time I’ve heard of that was when reading a discussion about creating “executables” with Common Lisp which is apparently achieved by serializing the program’s current state to disk. The very first Lisp implementation did that already. It could dump and read memory images to/from tape. From that on, most Lisp implementations, and not just Common Lisp, are doing it. Some have extensive capabilities in this area (like tree-shaking or generating shared libraries which can be included in programs).