Yenya's World

Wed, 06 Feb 2008

Event Library

For a distributed computing project of mine I have been looking for a lightweight library for event-driven programming. For Perl, I have found EV (with EV::Watcher::Bind add-on). Now the question is what to use for C.

I have decided to not use glib, because it is too heavyweight (with its own object system, etc.). The next choice was libev, because this is what the perl EV module is based on. And another one was libevent, which is already included in Fedora. Both libev and libevent are still being actively developed.

The most interesting thing is probably that in the libev documentation the author says that the glorified kqueue API on *BSD is broken on most *BSDs (scroll down to the EVBACKEND_KQUEUE text).

I will probably use libev: it even provides an API-compatible wrapper to libevent-based applications (does anybody know whether it is also ABI-compatible?), and according to its author, it is faster than libevent, even when using the libevent API wrapper. For further reading on why an advanced kernel API is needed instead of select(2) or poll(2) see The C10k problem article.

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Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak

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