file: module and character special files

[WILLIAMS Dominic]

From: Joachim Durchholz
> 
> If a programmer is concerned with file latencies, he can always
> create a separate Erlang node and use it to do the file
> handling. That's a heavyweight solution, and should be avoided
> unless there are no kernel threads, but it's possible.

Well, it's not that heavy in Erlang, and I can think of two reasons
why this strikes me as a very good idea:

1) Erlang is supposed to be portable, so relying on a feature that is
   not available on all platforms is not a good idea.
2) There are many very strange problems with networked file servers,
   be it NFS or Microsoft stuff... These tend to prop up when you
   deploy a system, whereas everything worked nicely during
   development and testing. Having a dedicated node handling a
   "logical" filesystem would make it very easy to fix such problems
   by just moving that erlang node around the network, if necessary
   right onto the machine actually hosting the filesystem, and relying
   on Erlang distribution instead of NFS...

Regards,

Dominic Williams.