{ inercia }

An Introduction to libuv

Libuv is the core library behind Node.js. Very similar to libevent or libev, it provides the main elements for event driven systems: watching and waiting for availability in a set of sockets, and some other events like timers or asynchronous messages. However, libuv also comes with some other extras like:

files watchers and asynchronous operations
a portable TCP and UDP API, as well as asynchronous DNS resolution
processes and threads management, and a portable inter-process communications mechanism, with pipes and work queues
a plugins mechanism for loading libraries dynamically
interface with external libraries that also need to access the I/O