Comment by bolangi

Have a look at Objective-Smalltalk[1][2], with polymorphic identifiers[3] (all identifiers are URIs), storage combinators[4] (virtual filesystems on steroids), and polymorphic write streams[5] (streams everywhere).

Objective-Smalltalk basically provides the sorts of things you write about locally at the language level. You could also move specific instances behind an operating system boundary.

[1] https://objective.st

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689492.3690052

[3] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2508168.2508169

[4] https://2019.splashcon.org/details/splash-2019-Onward-papers...

[5] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359619.3359748

Oh wow, I didn't know it had things like that.

Especially the CPU functionality is really interesting. I'm pondering similar problems and the current solutions just aren't good enough.

Redox seems to take inspiration from it and has all things exposed as schemes so /home/user is actually /scheme/file/home/user, etc.

I think there is a good case to be made for these things not to be mediated by the operating system by default.

In Objective-Smalltalk[1], I can access a file as follows:

   hello ← file:hello-world.txt 

This is structurally the same way I would access a local variable, environment variable, database, remote http server etc.

   hello ← https://example.com/hello-world.txt
   hello ← env:GREETING
   hello ← var:greeting         //   hello defaults to var:hello

etc.

And you can also introduce shortcuts

   scheme:greeter ← ref:https://example.com/ asScheme.
   hello ← greeter:hello-world.txt

Or

   scheme:greeter ← ref:file:./ asScheme
   hello ← greeter:hello-world.txt

Sending -asScheme to a reference is just a shorthand that actually constructs a composition[2] of a "path relative" store with the underlying store of the original reference. So the following two are identical:

   scheme:greeter ← ref:https://example.com/ asScheme.
   scheme:greeter ← #MPWRelativeScheme{ base: 'https://example/com' } → #MPWURLSchemeResolver{} 

This composition mechanism can be carried further with post-processing, so for example an img-scheme can be constructed by composing an image-decoder store with the previous store

   scheme:img ← #MPWImageDecoderStore{} → scheme:greeter 
   helloPic ← img:wave.png 

And so on and so forth, caching is also a nice example.

[1] https://objective.st

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359591.3359729

IMO screw that. It's maybe a good way to build software in exactly one environment for exactly one environment, deployment to a corporate server fleet.

Consider a Linux desktop distro: if every little binary (out of order of magnitude 1000) acted like the center of the universe with gigabytes of build environment and "opinions" galore instead of portability, builds would take much more resources than they already do and parts wouldn't necessarily work together.

Visual Studio and Xcode take up tens of gigabytes, are updated often, and include system components. Storing them in VCS is impossible, and would be a waste of disk space.