I ported unexecute to GNU Make about ten years ago.

I was working in a project in which a "make" would load a huge tree full of rules scattered in sub-makefiles, and take a full 30 seconds to evaluate before kicking off the first incremental build, really putting a damper on the edit-compile-test incremental cycle.

I got sick of this and so took the unexecute code from GNU Emacs into GNU Make, and added an option to do "make --dump" to dump an image after loading the rules. The restarted make image would kick off a build recipe almost instantly.