Show HN: VirtualStorageLibrary – .NET Tree solutions for items, dirs, symlinks
repository: https://github.com/shimodateakira/VirtualStorageLibrary

Hello HN, I'm excited to share a project I've been working on called VirtualStorageLibrary. It's a .NET library designed to manage in-memory tree structures, including items, directories, and symbolic links.

VirtualStorageLibrary is a .NET library that operates entirely in-memory and provides a tree-structured collection. This library offers a foundation for managing hierarchical data structures, supporting items, directories, and symbolic links that encapsulate user-defined types <T> (generic types defined by the user). This library is not a file system. Instead, it was redesigned from scratch to create a more flexible and user-friendly tree structure. The library aims to make it intuitive to reference, traverse, and manipulate nodes by specifying paths.

The collections provided by .NET are linear, including types like hash sets, arrays, lists, and dictionaries, which inherently have a linear structure (such as arrays and lists). In contrast, common file systems can be viewed as tree-shaped collections, where elements are managed as nodes in a hierarchical structure. While there are existing libraries that support tree-shaped collections, I couldn’t find one that models a file system-like structure. Therefore, I conceptualized a logical interpretation of a file system and asked, "Can we implement a tree collection purely as objects?" The goal was to create a system that can flexibly manage hierarchical and allow intuitive access.

Key Features:

Flexible Tree Structure Hierarchical structure based on parent-child relationships, enabling flexible node management.

Various Nodes Items, directories, and symbolic links, including user-defined types <T>.

Intuitive Node Operations via Paths API for referencing, searching, adding, deleting, renaming, copying, and moving nodes using paths.

Link Management Symbolic links managed with a link dictionary, tracking changes in target paths.

Circular Reference Prevention Detects and prevents circular references in paths involving symbolic links by throwing an exception.

Flexible Node List Retrieval Retrieves node lists within directories, filtered, grouped, and sorted by specified node types and attributes.

Anticipated Use Cases:

Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Knowledge Base Systems
Game Development
Hierarchical Clustering
Education and Learning
Development Status and Future Plans:

The current version is 0.8.0 (prerelease). As of 2024/08, all essential features for version 1.0.0 have been implemented. However, some bug fixes, around 30 feature improvements, and refactoring tasks remain. With version 0.8.0, we aim to gather user feedback, including bug reports and feature enhancement suggestions. Simultaneously, we plan to work through the remaining tasks for version 0.9.0, targeted for release in October 2024. During this period, class names, method names, property names, and other elements in the library may change, merge, or be deprecated without notice. Detailed information will be provided in the release notes, so please check them for updates.

For more detailed information on the current issues and planned improvements, please visit the following page (content in Japanese):

https://github.com/users/shimodateakira/projects/3/views/3

Thank you for your interest, and I look forward to your feedback.

- Akira Shimodate, AkiraNetwork