And here's a relevant explanation from drfuchs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13076098

I quote it in full, here:

OK, if you promise to stay off my lawn, I'll explain the history behind undump. Back in the 70's, the big CS departments typically had DEC 36-bit mainframes (PDP-10, PDP-20) running the Tops10/Tops20/Tenex/Waits/Sail family of operating systems. These are what Knuth used to do all of TeX, McCarthy LISP, and Stallman and Steele EMACS. Not Unix; and Linus hadn't touched a computer yet.

Executable program files were not much more than memory images; to run a program, the OS pretty much just mapped the executable image into your address space and jumped to the start. But when the program stopped, your entire state was still there, sitting in your address space. If the program had stopped due to a crash of some sort, or if it had been in an infinite loop and you had hit control-C to interrupt it, the program was still sitting there, even though you were staring at the command prompt. And the OS had a basic debugging capability built-in, so you could simply start snooping around at the memory state of the halted program. You could continue a suspended program, or you could even restart it without the OS having to reload it from disk. It was kind of a work-space model.

Translating into Linux-ish, it's as if you always used control-Z instead of control-C, and the exit() system call also behaved like control-Z; and gdb was a builtin function of the shell that you could invoke no matter how your program happened to have been paused, and it worked on the current paused process rather than a core file (which didn't exist).

The OS also had a built-in command to allow you to SAVE the current memory image back into a new executable file. There wasn't much to this command, either, since executables weren't much more than a memory image to begin with. So, the equivalent of dump/undump was really just built into the OS, and wasn't considered any big deal or super-special feature. Of course, all language runtimes knew all about this, so they were always written to understand as a matter of course that they had to be able to deal with it properly. It pretty much came naturally if you were used to that environment, and wasn't a burden.

Thus, when TeX (and I presume the various Lisp and Emacs and etc. that were birthed on these machines) were designed, it was completely expected that they'd work this way. Cycles were expensive, as was IO; so in TeX's case, for example, it took many seconds to read in the basic macro package and standard set of font metric files and to preprocess the hyphenation patterns into their data structure. By doing a SAVE of the resulting preloaded executable once during installation, everyone then saved these many seconds each time they ran TeX. But when TeX was ported over to Unix (and then Linux), it came as a bit of a surprise that the model was different, and that there was no convenient, predefined way to get this functionality, and that the runtimes weren't typically set up to make it easy to do. The undump stuff was created to deal with it, but it was never pretty, since it was bolted on. And many of use from those days wonder why there's still no good solution in the *nix world when there are still plenty of programs that take too damn long to start up.