For the record, you mention “the limitations of the number of inodes in Unix-like systems”, but this is not a limit in Unix, but a limit in filesystem formats (which also extends to Windows and other systems).
So it depends more on what the filesystem is rather than the OS. A FAT32 partition can only hold 65,535 files (2^16), but both ext4 and NTFS can have up to 4,294,967,295 (2^32). If using Btrfs then it jumps to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (2^64).
Why waste the inodes?
This is also going to make some devs (me) convulse when a PR is like, “small config change. updated 29 files”.
I have one that has 69 (noice) files changed.
What would you do with billions of inodes?
Run out, far more frequently than you would imagine.
That was my first reaction just by reading the title.
Mostly because I learned the hard way what inodes are.
Read the content. I address that issue.
For the record, you mention “the limitations of the number of inodes in Unix-like systems”, but this is not a limit in Unix, but a limit in filesystem formats (which also extends to Windows and other systems).
So it depends more on what the filesystem is rather than the OS. A FAT32 partition can only hold 65,535 files (2^16), but both ext4 and NTFS can have up to 4,294,967,295 (2^32). If using Btrfs then it jumps to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (2^64).