Re: Amazing... But also a bit stupid
You present some fascinating ideas. What struck me the most is
"because that's the design I am familiar with. It's the way I know." ...Spectrum BASIC to VAX/VMS to CP/M to RISC OS to OS/2 to Windows 95 to Windows NT to Linux...and Mac OS X.
Yes, I think we do tend to solidify our ideas based on experience. In Domain/OS, libraries were loaded globally; you didn't link to a file, you just called an OS function. In VMS, "default (current) directory" was merely a variable, not a verified location in the filesystem. Those examples make it easier to imagine OS features as independent from a file system.
1. If you have, say, a terabyte of non-volatile RAM, why do you need disks or paging at all?
Horses for courses. For example, a database runs in memory. One could argue that's the only place it really exists. If you export data to use in another program (e.g. financial reports), that might be easier as a named file rather than a memory segment.
No current OS organizes its RAM as a filesystem.
Fair point. That has advantages and disadvantages. I hope to never see another Linux OOM Killer.
I suggest that Object Storage is an example of an alternative to traditional filesystems, and might help imagine other ways to address data. I'd love to see a mail relay use Optane.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
