Re: Insane
In a way, I think Optane was a good idea poorly timed.
Ten years ago we all had spinning disks in our laptops and how transformative it was to replace the spinning disk with an SSD five years or so ago. Workloads had been disk-bound for decades while everything else on the system got orders of magnitude faster; suddenly, storage caught up several orders of magnitude. For most people, most of the time, their systems are now fast enough for their needs. Most people now look at their laptop and see how much slicker it is than five or seven years ago; the idea that storage could improve by another order of magnitude just doesn't hold that much attraction. If we'd had another ten years to get used to SSDs, we might be feeling the limits a bit more and faster storage would be more attractive.
To interact a bit with the author's ideas, they write this as though we could have jumped straight back to a 1960s paradigm because Octane appeared. Never mind that back then software amounted to hundreds of bytes and running a programme was expected to take hours or days; the idea of having more than one programme running at once simply didn't make sense to people then. Attacking the filesystem as an abstraction for managing storage is all very well, but unless your software is going to go back to being a single process of a few hundred bytes, you have to have *some* sort of abstraction for managing it. No-one really seems to have done any work towards figuring out what that abstraction could be. Saying you just install an application into primary memory and run it from there, where it maintains its state forever is all very well; how does that work if you want to run two copies of the same piece of software? If your answer is to separate data from code and have multiple copies of the data, how do you tell your computer to run a new one or pick up an old one? There is a new category of thing that is persistent process memory; how do you identify and refer to that thing? How does that model even work for something like a compiler, where you feed it a file and it produces another file in output? Is persistent state even useful there? If not, how does the abstraction work?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
