Std path does some weird things with UNC paths (\\?\). For one std::fs::canonicalize always returns one whether it is needed or not. Then path.join will just do a string concatenation leading to invalid paths. This leads to bugs in many important parts of the ecosystem. (Cargo, wasm-pack, Rustup)

So we need a library that provides a binding to GetFullPathNameW on windows and uses std::fs::canonicalize otherwize.
More ambitiously we need a path "interpreter" that ".. and . while appending. So if you started with \\?\C:\bar and joined ../foo you would iterate the components of ../foo and apply them to the base path, first applying .. to get \\?\C:\ and then applying foo to get \\?\C:\foo."

Ether part of this would be a valuable addition to the ecosystem!