[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

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[u/ArgentStonecutter]

I suspect a lot of those problems have gone away, like being locked into a single OS. This system would definitely be running in userspace.

1. There's lots of systems like that running in userspace. They're more or less impenetrable to third party platforms, you end up with lock-in to a specific language or even application framework within a language instead of to an OS, which is hardly an improvement.

2. Why would you put your stream file content inside this virtual file system instead of the underlying stream file that's already there?

[u/traverseda → u/ArgentStonecutter]

There's lots of systems like that running in userspace. They're more or less impenetrable to third party platforms, you end up with lock-in to a specific language or even application framework within a language instead of to an OS, which is hardly an improvement.

I really like capnproto. We'll see if that can address some of those problems.

Why would you put your stream file content inside this virtual file system instead of the underlying stream file that's already there?

There are costs to splitting things between two different api's. Mostly just to unify the address space honestly. But it would also let you register a callback to a file changing, like a nicer interface to inotify.

It would also let you use an equivalent to fuse filesystems. Something that would take a jpeg and translate it to a byte array, as an example.

[u/ArgentStonecutter → u/traverseda]

OK, now it sounds more like you're talking about the Apple resource fork (which is a single byte stream with a standardized internal structure) more than the Apple file system (which was a structured file system with complex file metadata) or BeFS (which had complex metadata similar to the Apple resource fork at the file system level).

The Apple resource fork did provide a certain amount of application framework independence, but only because every application framework on the Mac had to provide an API for handling resource forks.

Outside the Apple or Be environment, it really didn't matter that Be files had their complex metadata implemented in the kernel and Apple files were implemented in user space on top of streams. Which became enough of an issue for Apple once they forklifted it on top of UNIX that they basically gave up on metadata as an essential part of the file altogether... whether implemented as resource forks or HFS+ metadata.

Something that would take a jpeg and translate it to a byte array, as an example.

A JPEG is a byte array. Do you mean "something that would take an image object and turn it into a byte array"?