Ask HN: Long held tech taboos being broken?

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.

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