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by jodrellblank 541 days ago
> Nobody writes better filesystems

People tried: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_NTFS and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/fileio/depre...

"[Transactional NTFS (TxF)] was introduced with Windows Vista as a means to introduce atomic file transactions to Windows. It allows for Windows developers to have transactional atomicity for file operations in transactions with a single file, in transactions involving multiple files, and in transactions spanning multiple sources – such as the Registry (through TxR), and databases (such as SQL). While TxF is a powerful set of APIs, there has been extremely limited developer interest in this API platform since Windows Vista primarily due to its complexity and various nuances which developers need to consider as part of application development. As a result, Microsoft is considering deprecating TxF APIs in a future version of Windows"

2 comments

And even more ambitiously, WinFS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
Not really.

It was tried by one specific team, in one politics-guided environment. It was bounded to a ton of unrelated features because of politics, it was bounded to a specific API because of politics, it was bounded to a timeline and a team because of politics, and it was about a completely different OS.

We have no idea even how it went, because we can't trust the people reporting about it are talking about the correct thing.

"Nobody has written a hashing/bit-rot detecting filesystem"

"ZFS is one"

"It's not really because it was written by a team, and because it was made for Solaris which is a different operating system, and there was lots of politics involved with its licensing, and because it was bound to the POSIX file API, and because it does complex volume management as well, and because it happened within a timeline before Sun went out of business, and we even have no idea how ZFS went because every documentation and article which says it's about ZFS might be talking about something else".

uh huh.

If you used it as an example of why it always fails. And it failed because Sun was dysfunctional, then yeah, you could have a usable metaphor.