File crash consistency and filesystems are hard
https://danluu.com/file-consistency/ [danluu.com]
2016-12-29 04:45
Files are hard. Butler Lampson has remarked that when they came up with threads, locks, and condition variables at PARC, they thought that they were creating a programming model that anyone could use, but that there’s now decades of evidence that they were wrong. We’ve accumulated a lot of evidence that humans are very bad at reasoning about these kinds of problems, which are very similar to the problems you have when writing correct code to interact with current filesystems.