alt Hacker News> But those are all unsafe, taking raw strings.
The parent was asking for access to the C syscall, and C syscalls are unsafe, including in C. You can wrap that syscall in a safe interface if you like, and many have. And to reiterate, I'm all for supporting this pattern in Rust's stdlib itself. But openat itself is a questionable API (I have not yet seen anyone mention that openat2 exists), and if Rust wanted to provide this, it would want to design something distinct.
> Why can I easily use "*at" functions from Python's stdlib, but not Rust's?
I'm not sure you can. The supported pattern appears to involve passing the optional `opener` parameter to `os.open`, but while the example of this shown in the official documentation works on Linux, I just tried it on Windows and it throws a PermissionError exception because AFAIK you can't open directories on Windows.
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> AFAIK you can't open directories on Windows.
You can but you have to go through the lower level API: NtCreateFile can open a directory, and you can pass in a RootDirectory handle to following calls to make them handle-relative.
I took parent's message to be asking why the standard library fs primitives don't use `at` functions under the hood, not that they wanted the `at` functions directly exposed.
> which Rust's stdlib chose not to expose
i.e. expose through things like `File::open()`.