libuEv | Simple event loop for Linux

• Introduction
• API
  • Create an Event Context
  • Register an Event Watcher
  • Start Event Loop
  • Summary
• Using -luev
• Joystick Example
• Build & Install
• Motivation
• Origin & References

Introduction

libuEv is a simple event loop in the style of the more established libevent, libev and the venerable Xt(3) event loop. The u (micro) in the name refers to both the small feature set and the small size overhead impact of the library.

Experienced developers may appreciate that libuEv is built on top of modern Linux APIs: epoll, timerfd and signalfd. Note however, a certain amount of care is needed when dealing with APIs that employ signalfd. For details, see this article at lwn.net.

“Event driven software improves concurrency” -- Dave Zarzycki, Apple

Documentation

The API documentation is available as separate README in the src/ directory.

Build & Install

The library is built for and developed on GNU/Linux systems, patches to support *BSD and its kqueue interface are most welcome.

libuEv use the GNU configure and build system. To try out the bundled examples, use the --enable-examples switch to the configure script.

    $ ./configure
    $ make -j5
    $ make test
    $ sudo make install-strip
    $ sudo ldconfig

The resulting .so file is ~14 kiB (make install-strip).

Origin & References

libuEv was originally based on LibUEvent by Flemming Madsen but has been completely rewritten with a much clearer API. Now more similar to the famous libev by Mark Lehmann. Another small event library used for inspiration is the very small Picoev by Oku Kazuho.

libuEv is developed and maintained by Joachim Nilsson.