[usernam]

But is it? I don't actually think it's bad design. Having system images of a pre-loaded heap is pretty common in many systems and languages. How such systems are generated and loaded vary, but they always come with some tricky issues. This is especially common in lisp-like systems.

The whole lisp implementation is emacs is a bit crummy, but I don't get the excessive criticism against unexec. I consider lexical binding a much a much bigger oversight.