It turns out it's actually very easy to outperform off-the-shelf file systems depending on what your metric is. I discovered this when I was developing BitFort (abandoned project) which made use of WinFsp on Windows and pure FUSE on Linux. In my case the secret was having all the paths available in a fast in-memory data structure. I was dealing with a remote cloud file system, yet I was able to open up folders and browse around the file system faster than NTFS can with LOCAL file systems because every path and the MIME type is already in memory. For some applications (i.e. if you have trillions of small files) this might be a memory hog but for most I imagine it would be just fine. Seems like something OSes should have a toggleable option for...
I've been toying with the idea of releasing the bitfort source code as open source, but the usefulness is limited as it only worked with a very specific version of Node back in 2018 and the key dependencies (in particular the FUSE one) no longer works.
If I were to re-write I would do it in Rust for sure.
