alt Hacker NewsIf anything, I find the rust standard library to default to Unix too much for a generic programming language. You need to think very Unixy if you want to program Rust on Windows, unless you're directly importing the Windows crate and foregoing the Rust standard library. If you're writing COBOL style mainframe programs, things become even more forced, though I doubt the overlap between Rust programmers and mainframe programmers that don't use a Unix-like is vanishingly small.
This can also be a pain on microcontrollers sometimes, but there you're free to pretend you're on Unix if you want to.
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That's the same for the C or Python standard libraries. The difference is that in C you tend to use the Win32 functions more because they're easily reached for; but Python and Rust are both just as Unixy.
If you want to support file I/O in the standard library, you have to choose _some_ API, and that either is limited to the features common to all platforms, or it covers all features, but call that cannot be supported return errors, or you pick a preferred platform and require all other platforms to try as hard as they can to mimic that.
Almost all languages/standard libraries pick the latter, and many choose UNIX or Linux as the preferred platform, even though its file system API has flaws we’ve known about for decades (example: using file paths too often) or made decisions back in 1970 we probably wouldn’t make today (examples: making file names sequences of bytes; not having a way to encode file types and, because of that, using heuristics to figure out file types. See https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/file.1.html)