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by boondaburrah 1400 days ago
Resource Forks were necessary on early Macintosh so that the OS itself could partially load programs into RAM when you only had 512K or so, loading resources as needed.

You could argue that your resources instead should be multiple files in a folder so we don't have to treat a fork specially, and you'd be right, and you'd also have invented the NeXT/OSX .app bundle.

1 comments

I don't see the reason why the streams couldn't be implemented _on top_ of single stream filesystem implementations. The usecase you mention is probably solved with Virtual Memory and ELF today?
Yeah this design is pre-mmu and virtual memory, and NeXT/Apple solved it with bundles (store the streams as separate files in a specially named (ends in .app, .bundle, .framework etc) directory that the OS presents as a single file).

I... kinda want to see how this could be done with ELF now. It seems totally possible.