I don't think it's worth the trouble, both functions are only a few lines. It's definitely not worth adding potentially non-portable constructs for this.
@julliard Are you talking about the unification as a whole, or the `AT_EMPTY_PATH` discussion above (that just got fixed)? I recommended to @jhol to unify these routines in order to simplify the DOS Attributes (!924) implementation, since that also needs to be called from both paths.