I am developing an application which, at a very high level, can be summarized as a hierarchical arrangement of black-boxes, with each such black-box having inputs and outputs. I would like to have a representation of these inputs and outputs (in the same hierarchical arrangement) on the filesystem so that at runtime, other processes can interact with my application through the filesystem to stimulate the desired inputs and read the corresponding outputs. My question is whether a Virtual File System is the correct implementation for this requirement?
Some things that I have considered:
- Using a filesystem to interact between processes makes is very intuitive for humans to read/write these inputs/outputs, which is a critical need for my application
- Non filesystem approaches require additional custom tools to achieve the same simplicity for humans
- On Linux, /proc seems to already implement this concept
- Ideally, this should be a RAM resident filesystem, to avoid the latencies of disk access.
- My application is in Linux, written in C++ so hopefully I should be able to leverage some existing library for this
