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18 Anatomy of the boot image

The boot image is for Vicare what the basic run–time system, the dynamic library linker and the C Standard library are for the C language.

The boot image is a binary file in which the Scheme objects are serialised with the same format of FASL files representing compiled libraries (see fasl). The source code of the boot image is a set of Scheme libraries as defined by R6RS, with Vicare extensions; its compiled and serialised representation has the layout:

 header library header library header library header library ...
|------|-------|------|-------|------|-------|------|-------|---

where: