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by pdimitar 38 days ago
I agree, absolutely. Hence my adjacent thought that maybe all this should just be thrown away and we should invent an FS with ACID semantics.

I'm all for gradual improvements but at one point and on we should zoom even further out and pick our battles well.
2 comments
overfeed 38 days ago
> maybe all this should just be thrown away and we should invent an FS with ACID semantics.

You're describing WinFS, which looked into and ultimately abandoned Microsoft 20 years ago. I'm sure other groups have looked into this as well, but there's no such thing as free lunch.

> I'm all for gradual improvements but at one point and on we should zoom even further out and pick our battles well.

That sounds a lot like picking up more battles, yet we all still have 24 hours a day. Recursively trying to perfect lower layers will have you like Hal changing the lightbulb https://youtu.be/AbSehcT19u0

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pdimitar 38 days ago
Well, recursively trying to perfect lower layers is what I am advocating for us to not do.

As a guy who prefers to stop and think before coding, to me a lot of the older UNIX / GNU primitives seem broken (like the env vars process inheriting discussion that was here a while ago) and should be completely rethought. I also think people overreact and believe "everything will break". And we have libraries and runtimes that only implement small parts of libc and the deployed apps that use them are running mostly fine for years.

My broader point was: shall we not start breaking away from all this legacy? Must we always rely on corporations to lead the charge?

But yes, I do of course agree with the only 24h a day thing. And likely nobody would want to pay for such a trail-blazing work anyway. Sad world.

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kokada 38 days ago
If we are going so far to only guarantee correctness if we are using a FS that implements ACID semantics, why not just reinvent the whole kernel and remove all footguns, including memory safety? We could have a OS that each syscall to memory allocation can only be done through safe API.

Otherwise, it doesn't really make sense. The only reason we have things like Rust and other memory safe languages is because we want to create safer programs in the existing imperfect OSes that we have currently.

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pdimitar 38 days ago
Why not indeed? It would bring me a lot of hope.

Some time ago I loved the idea of Fuchsia... but then I learned it's made by Google. Sigh.

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kokada 37 days ago
Yes, this is why I am saying your idea of just reinventing the FS doesn't make sense. You don't get neither the wider ecosystem you get by having an OS compatible with e.g., POSIX semantics nor all the benefits you could get if you reinvent the whole OS.
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