repository: https://github.com/shimodateakira/VirtualStorageLibrary

Hello Dev.to,

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.

Here's an introduction to the library:

Project Overview and Purpose:

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 (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.

Project Background:

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 .

• 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.