Suffusion: Playing with Filesystems

Suffusion: Playing with Filesystems

In addition to the personally-long-awaited launch of Hermit Crab, I’ve also spent the last week or so making a limited but easy-to-use Swift wrapper around the FUSE APIs, which I’ve dubbed Suffusion. Suffusion is heavily inspired by the FUSE on macOS project’s Objective-C APIs, but simplified down to only support read-only filesystems, which is all I really want right now.

Why FUSE? Because like compilers, filesystems are sometimes seen as mystic-level programming, beyond the abilities of mere mortals. And from my perspective as a former compiler developer, filesystems really are harder in a number of ways: they have to deal with concurrency and mutable state, they have to be fast, they should be secure, and above all else they have to not corrupt user data.

But like compilers, you don’t have to jump into the deep end to learn about filesystems.1 At its simplest, a filesystem is just a tree structure that you navigate with a shell or a file browser. Read-only filesystems simplify things even further by only requiring you to implement a few operations. And FUSE makes it possible to do that without doing OS-level programming, or even root access.

I’ve used FUSE to explore archive formats, git repositories (with the help of SwiftGit2), and even dumps of Classic Mac resource forks. Porting these projects to Suffusion wasn’t hard and left me with code that was easier to maintain (if not actually shorter).

Suffusion works on macOS and Linux. If you build anything cool with it, let me know!

This entry was posted on July 07, 2020 and is filed under Technical. Tags: Swift, Source code, Package