Function nova_rt_fs_kind 

#[unsafe(no_mangle)]
pub unsafe extern "C" fn nova_rt_fs_kind(path: *const NovaStr) -> i64

What path is: 0 = metadata unavailable (absent, or unreadable), 1 file, 2 directory.

One call rather than separate is_file/is_dir intrinsics, so a DirEntry costs one syscall instead of two and the two answers cannot disagree.

The convention for an entry that is neither, stated here because the code below does not spell it out: it is classified 1 (file). The check is is_dir(), with everything else that exists falling to the else arm, so a FIFO, Unix domain socket, or device node – a filesystem entry that is genuinely neither a plain file nor a directory – is 1, not some third code. This is a stated convention, not a measurement: nothing in this codebase constructs such an entry to observe it against, and on Windows the class is structurally unreachable through this function’s metadata call. tests/runtime/fs_read_dir.nova’s fixture, the one test that drives this function, contains only a plain file and a subdirectory – it pins the two-way split, and says nothing about the third case, which is why this paragraph exists instead of a test.

Safety

path must point to a live NovaStr.