Copyright 2004 by M. Uli Kusterer Fri, 29 Nov -1901 11:06:32 GMT Comments on article blog-tempelmann-fsrefs at Zathras.de http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-tempelmann-fsrefs.htm witness_dot_of_dot_teachtext_at_gmx_dot_net (M. Uli Kusterer) witness_dot_of_dot_teachtext_at_gmx_dot_net (M. Uli Kusterer) en-us http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-tempelmann-fsrefs.htm#comment5 http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-tempelmann-fsrefs.htm#comment5 Thomas Tempelmann writes:
I just found this page after asking ask.com "who is" me. Everyone does that sometimes, don't you?

Anyways. Snow Leopard (10.6) will introduce a new API that replaces FSRefs with CFURLs - those are, other than FSRefs, reference counted, which allows the OS to manage the needed refs and discard of the obsolete ones. Which is important on Macs that access a lot of remote volumes, where the ref information wouldn't fit into a FSRef (which is a container of a fixed size, i.e. 80 bytes). CFURLs get dynamically alloc'd and the user only holds a ref to it. That way, the lower FS levels are able to define the amount of storage the need for a ref to an object of their domain.

So, from 10.6 on, forget paths, forget FSRefs, be merry with CFURLs!
http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-tempelmann-fsrefs.htm#comment4 http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-tempelmann-fsrefs.htm#comment4 Uli Kusterer writes:
@jean-daniel Thanks for the correction. Peter Hosey also mentioned that it's actually in CoreServices, and of course you're both right.
http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-tempelmann-fsrefs.htm#comment3 http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-tempelmann-fsrefs.htm#comment3 If you want to be exact, it the Core Services's File Manager, not the CoreFoundation's one.

I really like the FSRef concept and miss it when I have to work on other system.
I hope futur OS X file systems will keep this concept.
http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-tempelmann-fsrefs.htm#comment2 http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-tempelmann-fsrefs.htm#comment2 Ahruman writes:
Aaron the point is not that paths are slower on OS X than on other systems, but that FSRefs are inherently faster than paths. (In potentia, anyway; obviously they could be implemented badly.)
http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-tempelmann-fsrefs.htm#comment1 http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-tempelmann-fsrefs.htm#comment1 Aaron Ballman writes:
So that makes me curious: does Apache on the Mac use POSIX paths, or FSRefs? What about other file-system intensive applications? Surely the path/inode-based APIs aren't going to be exponentially slower than FSRef APIs. I doubt Apple re-wrote all of the core utilities (ls, find, etc) that make up the OS to use File Manager calls instead, and the system is certainly responsive enough.