In-Memory Filesystems in Rust
5 days ago
- #Filesystems
- #Rust
- #Performance
- The author explores using in-memory filesystems in Rust for testing CLI tools to avoid slow file stat operations.
- Initial search for a Rust equivalent to Go's Afero leads to frustration due to lack of options and community pushback.
- The vfs crate is considered but lacks support for symlinks and file permissions, making it unsuitable for the author's needs.
- rsfs is another option but introduces complex type signatures and doesn't offer significant performance benefits over std::fs.
- Benchmarking reveals no significant performance difference between in-memory filesystems, ramdisk, and regular SSDs, suggesting modern storage and OS caching are highly efficient.
- The author concludes that testing directly against the filesystem is viable due to negligible performance gains from in-memory alternatives.