deg@drutx.ATT.COM (GillespieD) (06/26/87)
I've heard mention of "unexec"ing either GNU or Goslings emacs to speed up invokation. Can someone explain what this is, and how to do it? ihnp4!drutx!deg Don()Y
ron@topaz.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie) (06/27/87)
Unexec is a routine that causes the EMACS to write it's current memory image to disk. Much of EMACS start-up time is devoted to reading in and parsing the lisp extension packages (no one uses non-extended EMACS). Hence, you can decrease the startup time by writing the memory image after all the baseline lisp has been loaded and parsed. This is rather architecture specific, but has been done for a variety of the machines. GNU EMACS relies on it much, later UniPress releases have optimized things so that it really doesn't make that much of a difference, but it really depends on your machine speed. -Ron