Yeah, it is pretty unworkable now, and Emacs uses an object serialization approach that still works pretty well, but there are other methods too. There is some OpenVZ-derived way to make process snapshots in Linux whose name I've forgotten, but I've been wanting to look into it for this.
Yeah that might have been it, or something closely related. I do remember looking at that page and a bunch of similar ones. This was after there was a huge thread in the python.org bug tracker about speeding up Python start times, and they ended up doing it in a somewhat painful and module-specific manner. I wished they had done something like this instead. Linux really would benefit from some kind of kernel support for snapshotting executables, since there are all kinds of programs like libreoffice that are currently slow to start.
