It started as “just an allocator experiment.” Then it grew a compression engine. Then repair logic. Then identity. Then tags. Then time slicing. Then a namespace.

At some point I realized I wasn’t building components anymore — I had built the whole substrate.

Not a directory tree. A flat, identity-first namespace with semantic tags, time and generation slicing, CRC defense, extension chains, and deterministic resolution.

No public API. No SDK. It just speaks POSIX now.

I’m releasing the namespace engine today as a public reference implementation. It’s spec-locked, test-covered, and boring in the best way.

There’s no product. No startup. No VC story. Just a filesystem that finally works the way I always wished they did.

I’m tired. But I’m also weirdly calm about it.

If anyone wants to read, criticize, or tell me I reinvented something from 1987 — I’m ready.

From my understanding, we're still searching for empty space? We just have an easily computable sequence of spots to check. E.g., if our stride is 7 blocks, then instead of going linearly with a stateful search, we can easily compute where we check. It's hard to pull this apart from the README. The README looks a bit LLM generated (clued in by OP's comment as well), which contributes to the difficulty versus a more thoughtful writeup. Interesting idea, it's just hard to tell exactly what's going on.

case HN4_ERR_DATA_ROT: return 80;

case HN4_ERR_HEADER_ROT: return 80;

case HN4_ERR_PAYLOAD_ROT: return 80;

Yeah, good luck mounting that filesystem in production. You will need a lot of it...