Today we're going to take a brief look at two crates from the same author - Andy Barron. The first of them is app_dirs - a useful library to find platform-dependent directories, such as application configuration, data directory or cache. The second crate for today is preferences, which provides a simple way of managing user preferences and other data relevant to our program.

Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

We finished part 1 with a working FUSE filesystem representing an empty directory. Today we will continue the story and finally add some files to the mix.

Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

A traditional filesystem is typically implemented as a kernel module. However, some Unix-like operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and a few others) allow for userspace filesystems through a mechanism called FUSE. The canonical FUSE library is written in C and there are some bindings from other languages (Python, Ruby etc.)

The fuse crate is very interesting because it's a rewrite from C to Rust, leveraging many of Rust features unavailable in C. The only binding to libfuse is related to mounting and unmounting the filesystem, the rest is pure Rust.