Oh, by the way, I'm not a great fan of dumped images; they use up loads of space, and prevent the Lisp runtime from being shared between Lisp processes.
Genera could dump incremental images. We could do the same.
Hmm... that shouldn't be too hard to implement in cmucl.
And/or fasls could be made into mixins of incremental image dumps. stuff to be mmap'ed properly.
Not really, if you want to preserve the compile/load/run-time semantics of Common Lisp. (Code might need to be executed at load time.)
Except that mmap()ing probably won't do much good unless it's at a fixed address.
That's okay. Cmucl already maps images at fixed addresses.
Was it HP-UX that had a mechanism like that for its shared libraries, ensuring that none of the system libraries clashed, so it could just mmap() them with no memory- and time- hungry runtime linkage?
All modern unices (at least Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X) can do that. It's called ``prelinking'' under Linux, I don't reacall the Solaris name.
BTW, Juliusz is the one who first told me about Common Lisp;
I plead guilty. Julek