Personally I'm horrified by the vision of 18 different electron apps, each using gigabytes of storage space even when they're not running. But I think there's

Personally I'm horrified by the vision of 18 different electron apps, each using gigabytes of storage space even when they're not running. But I think there's always some essential state that we'll want to persist. And I agree that modern filesystems are way too janky. Its hard to store anything safely because there's no transactional support. Its hard to share edits between computers because files are totally opaque to the operating system. So my changes will clobber your changes. And the save-load loop is inefficient. Why do I have to write out my entire file again after making a single character change? But the core promise of persistent values is important. Why can't I just bless a variable in my program (and give it a name) and have it persist between instantiations? Like, if I give x some persistent identity, then set x = 5, it should still be 5 when I restart my computer, reload my webpage, or open a second web browser. I'm not sure if persistent memory is the answer. My take is that I think we need to start using CRDTs more deeply in our operating systems. A well written operation based CRDT (Concurrent Replicated Data Type) is an append-only log of patches, which together create a mutable value. Treating it as an append-only log makes it easy to store on disk or replicate over the network. And treating it like a value makes it easy to program against. The log of changes grows over time, but you don't have to store all of it. (Or really, any of it). You have a tunable knob of how much history you want to keep around. More history data means you can support branches, merging and time travel. Less history makes it smaller. (And the data you need to keep for merging is really tiny in practice, btw.) With CRDTs we can make magic variables which work like that if we want. And unlike persistent memory, CRDTs can share their value with other processes, other devices and other users. Rather than sysfs, procfs, etc, I want all the OS's internal state exposed as live variables I can just subscribe to. And I want my own data (documents, etc) to work exactly the same way. For some data sets (like my source code), I want to keep a full change history. And for other data sets (my CPU temperature) that should be something I explicitly opt in to. But regardless, all of this data should be able to be shared with a flick of the mouse.