Comment by jiggawatts

I picture a next-gen SCM having storage plugins, possibly implemented in something portable like WASM or a portable bytecode. This would enable archive formats to be unpacked for differencing and then repacked for consumption.

Alternatively, apps could detect and support SCM storage distinct from ordinary file storage.

As a trivial example: Office documents are just zip files, so compatible apps could just save them without compression when saving to SCM-managed folders.

Or better yet, compression, but restart it for each contained file to enable efficient binary diffs.