[ajross]

Those aren't general principles. They're just tricks. Some software uses them. No significant software paradigms are critically dependent on sparse files. Quite frankly almost no significant market-driving software uses them at all. Not sure what you have in mind, but a few examples might be helpful?

All of them have a straightforward expression using contiguous storage. At best, sparse files allow you to reduce application-layer complexity. But as I'm pointing out, that comes at the cost of filesystem-layer complexity up and down the stack and throughout the kernel, and that's a bad trade.