“Sun calls ZFS ‘The Last Word in Filesystems.’ but that is hyperbole. ZFS is one of the first widely deployed copy on write FSes. That certainly makes it a tremendous improvement over existing FSes, but pioneers are the ones with arrows in their back. By looking at ZFS’s development it is certainly possible to identify mistakes that they made, and ways to do things better if one were to start from scratch,” Gerbarg writes.
“Apple has a lot of talented filesystem engineers,” Gerbarg writes. “They are certainly capable of doing something comparable to ZFS, at least for their target market. The problem with developing a new modern filesystem is that it generally takes longer than a single OS release cycle. Most companies are really bad at having large teams focused on projects that will not ship in the next version of the project they are working on.”
Gerbarg writes, “This is a particularly acute problem at Apple, which traditionally has done things with very few engineers… I think people don’t appreciate how productive Apple is on a per-engineer basis. The downside of that is that sometimes it is hard to find the resources to do something large and time consuming, particularly when it is not something that most users will notice in a direct sense.”
Gerbarg writes, “The only major downside [with Apple developing a new modern filesystem in-house] is that if Apple is just starting on a next generation FS now it could be a long time before we get our hands on it.”
Full article – recommended – here.
[Attribution: Daring Fireball. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “MacRadDoc” for the heads up.]
