> When building databases, we care about durability, so database authors are usually well aware that you _have_ to use `F_FULLSYNC` for safety. The fact that `F_FULLSYNC` isn't safe means that you cannot write a transactional database on Mac, it is also a surprise to me.
> Without that, there are no way to ensure durable writes and you might get data loss or data corruption.
No, not without that. Even with that, you can't have durable writes; Not on a mac, or linux or anywhere else, if you are worried about fsync()/fcntl+F_FULLSYNC because they do nothing to protect against hardware failure: The only thing that does is shipping the data someplace else (and depending on the criticality of the data, possibly quite far).
As soon as you have two database servers, you're in a much better shape, and many databases like to try and use fsync() as a barrier to that replication, but this is a waste of time because your chances of a single hardware failure remain the same -- the only thing that really matters is that 1/2 is smaller than 1/1.
So okay, maybe you're not trying to protect against all hardware failure, or even just the flash failure (it will fail when it fails! better to have two nvme boards than one!) but maybe just some failure -- like a power failure, but guess what: We just need to put a big beefy capacitor on the board, or a battery someplace to protect against that. We don't need to write the flash blocks and read them back before returning from fsync() to get reliability because that's not the failure you're trying to protect against.
What does fsync() actually protect against? Well, sometimes that battery fails, or that capacitor blows: The hardware needed to write data to a spinning platter of metal and rust used to have a lot more failure points than today's solid state, and in those days, maybe it made some sense to add a system call instead of adding more hardware, but modern systems aren't like that: It is almost always cheaper in the long run to just buy two than to try and squeeze a little more edge out of one, but maybe, if there's a case where fsync() helps today, it's a situation where that isn't true -- but even that is a long way from you need fsync() to have durable writes and avoid data loss or corruption.