Forest: A Language and Toolkit for Programming With Filestores

Many applications use the file system as a simple persistent data store. This approach is expedient, but not robust. The correctness of such an application depends on the collection of files, directories, and symbolic links having a precise organization. Furthermore these components must have acceptable values for a variety of file system attributes such as ownership, permissions, and timestamps. Unfortunately, current programming languages do not support documenting assumptions about the file system. In addition, actually loading data from disk requires writing tedious boilerplate code.