Several efforts have been made over the years for developing file systems in user space. Many of these efforts have failed to make a significant impact as measured by their use in production systems. Recently, however, user space file systems have seen a strong resurgence. FUSE is a popular framework that allows file systems to be developed in user space while offering ease of use and flexibility.In this paper, we discuss the evolution of user space file systems with an emphasis on FUSE, and measure its performance using a variety of test cases. We also discuss the feasibility of developing file systems in high-level programming languages, by using as an example Java bindings for FUSE that we have developed. Our benchmarks show that FUSE offers adequate performance for several kinds of workloads.