<story><title>Apple File System</title><url>https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/documentation/FileManagement/Conceptual/APFS_Guide/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40016999</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ahl</author><text>The spartan description of APFS certainly sounds like the (partial) feature list for ZFS--the comparisons made in the comments here are on-point. ZFS though took around 5 years to ship and, arguably, another 5-10 to get right. I say this having shipped multiple products based on ZFS, writing code in ZFS, and diagnosing production problems with it.&lt;p&gt;On-disk consistency (&amp;quot;crash protection&amp;quot;), snapshots, encryption, and transactional interfaces (&amp;quot;atomic safe-save&amp;quot;) will no doubt be incredibly valuable. I don&amp;#x27;t think though though that APFS will dramatically improve upon the time it took ZFS to mature from a first product to world-class storage.&lt;p&gt;Some commenters have opined that (despite Apple distributing ZFS for Mac OS X at WWDC nearly a decade ago) that ZFS would never be appropriate for the desktop, phone, or watch. True ZFS was designed for servers and storage servers, but I don&amp;#x27;t think there&amp;#x27;s anything that makes it innately untenable in those environments--even its default, but not essential, use of lots of RAM.&lt;p&gt;Who knows... maybe Apple have spent the decade since killing their internal ZFS port taking this new filesystem though the paces. Its level of completeness though would suggest otherwise.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mioelnir</author><text>Between the ZFS-like features and the advertised &amp;quot;novel copy-on-write metadata&amp;quot; scheme, I would not be surprised if it was partially based on DragonFly&amp;#x27;s HAMMER&amp;#x2F;HAMMER2 filesystem.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple File System</title><url>https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/documentation/FileManagement/Conceptual/APFS_Guide/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40016999</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ahl</author><text>The spartan description of APFS certainly sounds like the (partial) feature list for ZFS--the comparisons made in the comments here are on-point. ZFS though took around 5 years to ship and, arguably, another 5-10 to get right. I say this having shipped multiple products based on ZFS, writing code in ZFS, and diagnosing production problems with it.&lt;p&gt;On-disk consistency (&amp;quot;crash protection&amp;quot;), snapshots, encryption, and transactional interfaces (&amp;quot;atomic safe-save&amp;quot;) will no doubt be incredibly valuable. I don&amp;#x27;t think though though that APFS will dramatically improve upon the time it took ZFS to mature from a first product to world-class storage.&lt;p&gt;Some commenters have opined that (despite Apple distributing ZFS for Mac OS X at WWDC nearly a decade ago) that ZFS would never be appropriate for the desktop, phone, or watch. True ZFS was designed for servers and storage servers, but I don&amp;#x27;t think there&amp;#x27;s anything that makes it innately untenable in those environments--even its default, but not essential, use of lots of RAM.&lt;p&gt;Who knows... maybe Apple have spent the decade since killing their internal ZFS port taking this new filesystem though the paces. Its level of completeness though would suggest otherwise.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jburwell</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s impossible to know how long they have been working on it.  As I recall, Swift had been in development for 3+ years before it saw the light of day.</text></comment>