Node.js: manipulate file like a stack - node.js

Question

I'm envisioning a implementation in node.js that can manipulate a file on disk as if it's a stack data struct.
Suppose file is utf-8 encoded plain text, each element of the stack corresponds to a '\n' delimited line in the file, and top of stack point to first line of that file. I want something that can simultaneously read and write the file.
const file = new FileAsStack("/path/to/file");
// read the first line from the file,
// also remove that line from the file.
let line = await file.pop();
To implement such interface naively, I could simply read the whole file into memory, and when .pop() read from memory, and write the remainder back to disk. Obviously such approach isn't ideal. Imagine dealing with a 10GB file, it'll be both memory intensive and I/O intensive.
With fs.read() I can read just a slice of the file, so the "read" part is solved. But the "write" part I have no idea. How can I effectively take just one line, and write the rest of the file back to it? I hope I don't have to read every bytes of that file into the memory then write back to disk...
I remember vaguely that file in a filesystem is just a pointer to a position on disk, is there any way I can simply move the pointer to the start of next line?
I need some insight into what syscalls or whatever can do this effectively, but I'm quite ignorant to low level system stuffs. Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

What you're asking for is not something that a standard file system can do. You can't insert data into the beginning of a file in any traditional OS file system without rewriting the entire file. That's just the way they work.
Systems that absolutely need to be able to do something like that without rewriting the entire file and still use a traditional OS file system will build their own mini file system on top of the regular file system so that one virtual file consists of many pieces written to separate files or to separate blocks of a file. Then, in a system like that, you can insert data at the beginning of a virtual file without rewriting any of the existing data by writing a new block of data to disk and then updating your virtual file index (stored in some other file) to indicate that the first block of your virtual file now comes from a specific location. This file index specifies the order of the blocks of data in the file and where they come from.
Most programs that need to do something like this will instead use a database for storing records and then use indexes and queries for controlling order and let the underlying database worry about where individual bits get stored on disk. In this way, you can very efficiently insert data anywhere you want in a resulting query.