alt Hacker NewsMost lisp systems get recompiled from sources, and while they support dumping an image, that's essentially an optimization. Emacs for example makes an initial dump, then loads the rest from .el files, and the base image remains static (you can dump a new image from a running emacs, but it's always been fiddly). The only thing left that I know of that's image-first is Smalltalk, and not even all implementations.
I once inherited an APL system which was just an image. I didn't know where to start trying to get function definitions out of it and into some kind of version control and eventually ported to something else. I'm interested to know how much better it would have gone with LLMs.