There is an open source library that gives these (and more system info stuff) across many platforms: SIGAR API.
Sadly these things rely heavily on the underlying OS, so there are no platform-independent calls. (Maybe there are some wrapper frameworks, but I don't know of any.).
Here's a class for memory usage on UNIX machines.
The psutil library will give you some system information (CPU / Memory usage) on a variety of platforms.
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