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Comment by cm3 | Hacker News Reader

The filesystem metadata queries were real-time back when spinning disks were much slower and neither the processing power or ram was comparable to what we have today. With today's machines we do not have the same experience under Windows, macos, GNOME, KDE. Feature-wise yes, performance no. Is there a technical reason we couldn't have the same filesystem integration? No, there isn't, it's just incompatible priorities and half-baked 2nd system syndrome in effect and repeated all the time.

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BeOS did it by writing their own filesystem. The filesystem author wrote a good book about the design and implementation, including overviews of other filesystems (eg NTFS). He has made the book available for free download at http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf

Ars Technica also has a nice 2010 article: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/06/the-be...

The way it implemented the queries well was because they were integrated into the filesystem. Windows/Mac/Linux do it in userspace. Doing it in the filesystem would be considered a layering violation by most.

Layer violations are fine if they give you value. ZFS is very layer "violating" as well. However, the layers are concepts put in place by humans to help, not God given laws of nature.

Agreed, and if you run on a microkernel, then pretty much everything is in userspace and any boundaries are those of, say, a capability system for security purposes. I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that we're adding ways to avoid the kernel network stack and other exceptions to the rule, while ignoring microkernels as the sorely needed feature for mainstream computing it is.

Yeah, Dominic Giampaolo. He works at Apple now and is heading its new file system efforts.

For years I though he was secretly writing a BeFS like replacement to HFS.

APFS seems less ambitious however.

We have all that and more in macos today and have for many years. Spotlight is implemented by the same person who wrote BeFS.

The last time I used Spotlight (no mac at the moment), it was so slow that I had to disable it globally. The metadata integration in BeOS was different. For example media and email storage in BeOS.

Spotlight is amazing, I use it everyday. It is VERY fast.

I feel like I'm missing out. I occasionally use it to search for images in web applications I'm working on, and that's about it. What else is it good for that i could be doing?

It's a perfectly good launcher, for one thing. Having it right under my fingers (cmd+space) means I almost always use Spotlight to launch apps.

Good points, though hard disk sizes are orders of magnitude bigger than they were in the day of BeOS.

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