Operating systems and file systems have traditionally been developed hand in hand. They impose mutual constraints on each other. Today we have two major leaders in file system semantics: Windows and POSIX. They are very close to each other when compared
to the full set of possibilities. Interesting things happened before POSIX monopolized file system semantics.
When you use a file system through a library instead of going through the operating system there are some extra possibilities. You are no longer required to obey the host operating system's semantics for filenames. You get to decide if you use / or \
to separate directory components (or something else altogether). Maybe you don't even use strings for filenames. The fs-fatfs library uses a list of strings, so it's up to the caller to define a directory separator for themselves. While working on that
library, I was driven to write down some ideas that I've previously run across and found inspirational.
A deep dive into file system hierarchies before the major platforms we used today - POSIX and Windows - became the two de-facto standards. Excellent article, and a joy to read.
https://www.osnews.com/story/132333/non-posix-file-systems/
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