Ask HN: Long held tech taboos being broken?
3 comments
Not sure I can distill it to a single 'taboo', but the SSD revolution is definitely upending a lot of conventional wisdom about storage and how it must be used.
With SSDs:
- Read and write are radically faster and will get faster still
- Seek time does not exist
- Fragmentation is irrelevant
- Concurrent random access is at least technically possible, at least to far enough regions that they reside on different physical flash units/sections of the chip.
In short: it's slower non-volatile RAM.
The next generation of SSD will be wired into the DRAM bus, presenting itself to the OS not as a "drive" (drive buses will be gone) but as a non-volatile region of RAM.
That's going to radically change how we do storage in lots of ways and probably upend dozens of "taboos." Here's a few predictions:
- Obsolescence of read/write based file IO APIs in favor of mmap() for all persistent objects. Everything is "memory." Files are memory, objects are memory, etc. There are just different types of memory: RAM, fast NV, slow NV. (Slow NV would be spinning disk or remote storage.)
- Obsolescence of byzantine caching schemes... just access stuff.
- As a side effect of these: obsolescence of database queries/responses. Instead data will just be accessed as variables in your code with no intermediate layers. The productivity gain will be insane.
Also... I am the author of the IPv6 notation post on the ZeroTier blog. I never thought a little gripe with some suggested alternative ideas would get over a million hits in two days. Guess I hit some kind of nerve. :P
Edit: I decided to bang out a followup to the IPv6 post:
https://www.zerotier.com/blog/?p=774
With SSDs:
- Read and write are radically faster and will get faster still
- Seek time does not exist
- Fragmentation is irrelevant
- Concurrent random access is at least technically possible, at least to far enough regions that they reside on different physical flash units/sections of the chip.
In short: it's slower non-volatile RAM.
The next generation of SSD will be wired into the DRAM bus, presenting itself to the OS not as a "drive" (drive buses will be gone) but as a non-volatile region of RAM.
That's going to radically change how we do storage in lots of ways and probably upend dozens of "taboos." Here's a few predictions:
- Obsolescence of read/write based file IO APIs in favor of mmap() for all persistent objects. Everything is "memory." Files are memory, objects are memory, etc. There are just different types of memory: RAM, fast NV, slow NV. (Slow NV would be spinning disk or remote storage.)
- Obsolescence of byzantine caching schemes... just access stuff.
- As a side effect of these: obsolescence of database queries/responses. Instead data will just be accessed as variables in your code with no intermediate layers. The productivity gain will be insane.
Also... I am the author of the IPv6 notation post on the ZeroTier blog. I never thought a little gripe with some suggested alternative ideas would get over a million hits in two days. Guess I hit some kind of nerve. :P
Edit: I decided to bang out a followup to the IPv6 post:
https://www.zerotier.com/blog/?p=774
When React was released it pushed against some long-held (and still widely held) beliefs about separation of concerns, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY
Years later, it's still a major point of contention, and a bit of a taboo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY
Years later, it's still a major point of contention, and a bit of a taboo.
[deleted]
Object Oriented Programming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM
IPv6 notation: https://www.zerotier.com/blog/?p=724
Virtual Memory: https://matildah.github.io/posts/2016-01-30-unikernel-security.html