This is super cool.
Why would somebody need to use this instead of like, smb or however normal Windows machines on the same network share drives/files/folders (even with other Mac machines on the network, or Linux, etc.)?
Why would somebody need to use this instead of like, smb or however normal Windows machines on the same network share drives/files/folders (even with other Mac machines on the network, or Linux, etc.)?
For example, you could make a "filesystem" where everything inside looks like an uncompressed BMP file, but the actual files backing them are some other image format. Then ancient software would be able to use the newest image formats.
I've never written an SMB server, but I assume it is a lot more complicated than using WinFsp or Fuse.
WSL 2 uses the 9P network filesystem to share files between Linux & Windows. Supposedly this is a simple protocol to implement. I've searched, but can't find any documentation on using 9P without WSL.
Both OSes treat network filesystems differently from local disks. The FUSE-T implementation is very speedy, but it shows up in the finder as a connection to "localhost", not as a properly named mount. In addition, macOS creates .DS_Store files on network drives by default (there is a setting you can change from the CLI to prevent this). On Windows, the filesystems can be mounted as local drives or network drives. When mounted as network drives, they can have issues with indexing and trust. All-in-all, drives you expect to function as local drives work best when they're actually local device filesystems and not network mounts.