That's technically POSIX, not standard C, isn't it?
But in any case, I'm pretty sure Rust has supported the nonblocking functionality you want for quite a while now (maybe since 1.1.0)? You'll need to piece it together yourself and use the libc crate since it's a platform-specific thing, but it doesn't seem too horrendous. Ultimately it comes down to the fact that the fundamental method for the std:io::Read is
which is perfectly compatible with non-blocking reads. For example, std::io::File implements Read and std::os::fd::FromRawFd, so if you can get a non-blocking file descriptor you should have non-blocking reads for files.
What way is that? I didn't think the C standard library had any understanding of blocking/non-blocking.