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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

358 points ofalkaed | 1 comments | 11 Oct 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
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w10-1 ◴[12 Oct 25 05:50 UTC] No.45555619[source]▶
Optane persistent memory had a fascinating value proposition: stop converting data structures for database storage and just persist the data directly. No more booting or application launch or data load: just pick up where you left off. Died because it was too expensive, but probably long after it should have.

VM's persist memory snapshots (as do Apple's containers, for macOS at least), so there's still room for something like that workflow.

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1. lexszero_ ◴[14 Oct 25 08:27 UTC] No.45577569[source]▶
I haven't heard about Optane before, but the concept of persistent memory reminds me of PhantomOS[0], which is based around the idea that from the app perspective everything is already in memory and the kernel/runtime (JVM-ish, so object-aware) takes care of {,de}serialization to a non-volatile storage by virtue of a highly sophisticated virtual memory manager so the app programmer doesn't have to think about it. I remember seeing it being presented at some conference around 2012 and the live demo running Tetris game slowed down to a crawl and crashed after a few blocks due to bugs in GC.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_OS