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Does this have a practical use? It's definitely a novel application of a property of Rust. It's also been my impression filesystem consistency is largely a so

Does this have a practical use? It's definitely a novel application of a property of Rust. It's also been my impression filesystem consistency is largely a solved problem thanks to write-ahead logs (WAL) and the like. It's nice the authors included a link to the underlying source code in the last paragraph: https://github.com/utsaslab/squirrelfs https://github.com/utsaslab/squirrelfs

vlovich123 2y ago
There’s a pretty big difference between leveraging the compiler to do a formal proof of the codebase on your behalf vs runtime tests to make sure your WAL is maintaining the invariants you expect it to have.
IshKebab 2y ago
Does what have a practical use? The actual filesystem, or using the typestate pattern to prove the absence of bugs? The latter is clearly a practical use - no bugs (or at least vastly less likely bugs). The former is maybe a no since it seems like the authors couldn't achieve their results for "normal" filesystems because they are asynchronous - only for "persistent memory" which is synchronous. I dunno exactly who has persistent memory though. I guess it's stuff like Intel's Optane (which was discontinued)?
jmartin2683 2y ago
The idea of typestate programming and how it allows you to model all of the valid states and transitions between them is definitely useful in a lot of contexts. if you’ve ever had to call some init() method on an object in an OO language before you could call something else, this pattern would throw a compile time error if you violate that.