[rakoo]

I'm absolutely not an expert, but I feel like log-structured filesystems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-structured_file_system) are a natural fit for this kind of things: an index "just" has to read the latest written entries.

But if we're talking about the future, we're probably talking about btrfs and zfs, both of which have the internal machinery to give you a feed of "recently changed files" up to the beginning of the filesystem.

While writing this answer I stumbled upon https://github.com/rflament/loggedfs which is probably a very nice solution to this problem.