Oh cool, so using io uring plus pragma data version would actually beat stat on Linux holistically speaking? The stat choice was all about cross platform consistency over inotify speed. But syscalls overwhelm can be real.
“Beat” is all relative. It depends on load and how frequently you’re doing it, but generally yes. But if you’re doing io_uring, you may as well use inotify because you’re in the platform specific API anyway as that’s the biggest win because you’re moving from polling to change detection which is less overhead and lower latency. Inotify can be accessed by io_uring and there may even be cross-platform libraries for your language that give you a consistent file watcher interface (although probably not optimally over io_uring). Whether it’s actually worth it is hard as I don’t know what problem you’re trying to solve, but the super lowest overhead looks like inotify+iouring (it also has the lowest latency)
If you're interested you can use kqueue on FreeBSD and Darwin to watch the inode for changes. Faster than a syscall, especially if all you need is a wakeup when it changes.
