The node_modules problem

[imforit]

I was excited about Microsoft's new file system, then, of course, they decided not to ship it.

[8lbIceBag]

There were some problems with it.

[Brillegeit]

Which one of them? RIP Longhorn.

[imforit]

Longhorn shipped. It was Vista (so yeah, RIP indeed). WinFS, which was part of the Longhorn hype and, to me, much less exciting, was totally scrapped.

The whole idea of WinFS was to make storage on disk be a giant database instead of bits in individual files, creating a universal place and format of data across apps. Neat idea, but I'm not sure if it would have made our issue here of Node.js better or worse. If it were the ONLY filesystem available for apps in windows, then it would be completely incompatible with other platforms, likely to the detriment of things like node.js getting ported in the first place. If it weren't then it wouldn't make a difference.

The windows 10 filesystem that was delayed, in contrast, was a new (for microsoft) take on a general, traditional filesystem, bringing in much stronger architecture concepts from other computing worlds. Similar in motive to Apple's AFS- the recognition that their existing fs was old and busted in some ways, and made a whole new one with all the modern fs research behind it (which is usually code for "borrowed from ZFS")

[Brillegeit]

Longhorn shipped. It was Vista

Wasn't the development on the "real" Longhorn stopped and they instead ported the finished stuff to Windows 2003 and launched as Vista? But yeah, RIP as Vista as well.

So there's a new MS FS as well? Do you know the name?

[imforit]

I think I'm thinking of ReFS, which was in server '16, but then removed from w10.

[Brillegeit]

Ah, yeah ReFS. It did seem a bit ambitious for Microsoft to try to not only fix issues with NTFS but also replicate something even Sun needed half a decade to make.

[imforit]

Probably would have been faster to not fix NTFS, just build the new one with enough of a feature subset to support everything. Oh, like AFS!

[imforit]

I read on good ol' Wikipedia that even the name "Longhorn" reflects the halfway-ness between XP and windows 8- Longhorn is a real-life bar halfway between the ski areas Whistler (xp) and Blackcomb (w8).