This is true if by modern filesystem you're thinking something comparable to ZFS.

On the other hand, if it's the lack of journaling that's a turn-off, seriously consider soft updates (softdep). Despite being seemingly an evolutionary dead end due to implementation complexity demands (basically, it's only feasible to implement at the level where it's possible to diagram out implied dependencies between all primitive operations), it is still in some respects superior to the journaling approach.

In any case, I find that, from reading the design, it feels more elegant and fundamentally right.

http://static.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/us...