zlacker

>>jsnell+(OP)
I've come around to the opinion that (POSIX-style) filesystems are no longer a great idea. Instead, I think something more like Git (plumbing, not porcelain) would be preferable as the underlying storage abstraction.

>>carapa+3t
What exactly are you thinking of? Git manages files after all.

If you mean the underlying data structures, that's basically what modern filesystems are. XFS, APFS, BTRFS etc are all copy-on-write file systems that use git-like structures underneath. In the same way that git branches are "instant" because no data is actually copied, so too can these file systems clone files or whole trees instantly without copying any real data. You can easily "branch" a directory tree, rsync the results to a remote machine, etc.

>>mike_h+LI
The thought is somewhat inchoate still. I'm working with a pure functional language (Joy https://joypy.osdn.io/ ) and when it came time to add filesystem support I balked. Instead, I'm trying out immutable 3-tuples of (hash, offset, length) to identify sequences of bytes (for now the "backing store" is just a git repo.) Like I said, it's early days but so far it's very interesting and useful.

I get what you're saying about modern filesystems, and I agree. I guess from that POV I'm saying we could stand to remove some of the layers of abstraction?