Dev Tools · 1h ago
Rust Dev Builds Disk Monitor Without Shelling Out to df
A developer building a btop-style system monitor in Rust hit a wall: no /proc file reports filesystem fullness. The only way is the statvfs syscall, which requires unsafe Rust via the libc crate. He chose the syscall over parsing df output, writing his first unsafe block to keep the tool dependency-free.
Meridian48 take
This is a niche but instructive look at how system tools often wrap syscalls, and why Rust devs sometimes must touch unsafe for low-level access.
rustsystem-monitor