Brett (ggtgp.delete@this.yahoo.com) on November 24, 2020 8:01 pm wrote:
>
> The Linux build system dates back to the 1960’s, beyond antique and well into archeological.
>
> MMAPing thousands of files to do a build with a 4K file mapping and an average of say 8k per file. Let’s
> do the simplest update to something approaching a real database, like say consolidate all the files in
> a folder level into one file with a header so you can pipe the individual files inside to GCC. Average
> wasted disk space went from 25% (2k) to a few hundred bytes. Which means 22% less memory used, 22% less
> disk sectors loaded, and now you are only mapping hundreds of files and not thousands.
>
> Git can be updated to use this format, and editors would use an interface that faked a filesystem so that
> they and other tools are none the wiser. Just add a filesystem driver that writes to the new database.

First, I suspect your average file size estimates are off. I did not look at the Firefox sources, but C/C++ source files in the projects I interact with are more in the range of tens KiB. Source files of hundreds KiB are not uncommon.

Second, what makes you think that this new database format will be faster than the other database format, which we currently call "a filesystem"? In order to be efficient on the current hardware, it will have to face the same problems, and I assume it will have to make some tradeoffs, not unlikely the same as those made in the current filesystems. And we do already have plenty filesystems, with different design decisions, features, performance and reliability, for every taste.

Third, every filesystem has a standardized API (well, at least as long as we talk of POSIX systems; the same argument works in Windows world, too). Any build system, any compiler, editor or VCS can use this API, and it will work with any filesystem. If your new database format doesn't support it, then it is DOA, because noone except you is going to support it. So even if your format is fast, and you implement a build system that works wonders with it, it won't take off because a whole lot of other software won't work with it. And no, you won't be able to rewrite the world to support it.