Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series: Amit Singh May 24, 2007

Please join us for Amit Singh's discussion of MacFuse, an open-source Mac port of the FUSE mechanism for Linux. Doors open at 6:30 PM and refreshments will be served. More information available from the event homepage link.

Talk abstract:
File systems provide one of the most familiar interfaces end users know. Since implementing a traditional file system is extremely complex and difficult, presenting information seamlessly through files and folders has typically been limited to a small set of select programmers--often kernel hackers who develop at the lowest layers of a system.

The MacFUSE mechanism breaks this barrier on Mac OS X by doing all the in-kernel hard work once and for all and leaving to the developer only the file-system-specific logic, which can be implemented as a regular user-space application. MacFUSE, with its simple programmer-visible API (same as the Linux FUSE API) and multiple language bindings, almost trivializes the process of making anything and everything appear seamlessly as a set of files and folders. You can use it to blur the line between the Macintosh Desktop and the Web. In this talk, you will hear the story of MacFUSE from its creator.

More on Amit:
Amit Singh is an operating systems researcher, programmer, and author. He manages the Macintosh engineering team at Google. Previously, Amit has worked on operating systems at IBM Research and Bell Laboratories. He is the author of the book "Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach". Amit also created and maintains osxbook.com and kernelthread.com. Amongst his recent open source contributions is MacFUSE, a Mac OS X implementation of the FUSE (File System in USEr Space) mechanism.

Official Website: http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/05/open-source-developers-google-speaker.html