libxev: A cross-platform, high-performance event loop

This is my project.

I use it as the core cross-platform event loop layer for my terminal (https://mitchellh.com/ghostty). I still consider libxev an early, unstable project but the terminal has been in use by hundreds to now over a thousand beta testers daily for over a year now so at least for that use case its very stable. :) I know of others using it in production shipped software, but use it at your own risk.

As background, my terminal previously used libuv (the Node.js core event loop library), and I think libuv is a great project! I still have those Zig bindings available (archived) if anyone is interested: https://github.com/mitchellh/zig-libuv

The main issue I had personally with libuv was that I was noticing performance jitter due to heap allocations. libxev's main design goal was to be allocation-free, and it is. The caller is responsible for allocating all the memory libxev needs (however it decides to do that!) and passing it to libxev. There were some additional things I wanted: more direct access to mach ports on macOS, io_uring on Linux (although I think libuv can use io_uring now), etc. But more carefully controlling memory allocation was the big one.

And it worked! Under heavy IO load in my terminal project, p90 performance roughly matched libuv but my p99 performance was much, much better. Like, 10x or more better. I don't have those numbers in front of me anymore to back that up and my terminal project hasn't built with libuv in a very long time. But I consider the project a success for my use case.

You're probably better off using libuv (i.e. the Node loop, not my project) for your own project. But, the main takeaway I'd give people is: don't be afraid to reimplement this kind of stuff for you. A purpose-built event loop isn't that complicated, and if your software isn't even cross-platform, it's really not complicated.

on MacOS are kqueue and libdispatch/grand central dispatch doing different things?

We copied libxev's code for the timer heap implementation in Bun for setTimeout & setInterval, and it was a ~6x throughput improvement[0] on Linux compared to our previous implementation.

[0]: https://twitter.com/jarredsumner/status/1736741811039899871

As someone maintaining a project with its own event loop: don't do it in larger projects.

The problem is that you'll start having dependencies on external libraries. And when those then need event loop integration, things get messy. We've introduced bugs before, caused by subtle differences in semantics. (Like: does write imply read? Are events disarmed while running? What about errors?)

If the lib and event loop are reasonably popular, someone else probably has integrated them before. Or the lib supports the event loop natively (or uses libverto.) Either saves you some trouble.

Also: please add libverto support for your event loop :) https://github.com/latchset/libverto

Can this be used to make something that feels like Qt's signals and slots?

Completion based cross-platform I/O? Sign me up.

io_uring support is obviously great & excellent, fulfills the "high performance" part well. brought an immediately smile to my face.

i was not expecting "Wasm + WASI" support at all. that's very cool. implementation is wasi_poll.zig (https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev/blob/main/src/backend/wa...). not to be unkind, but this makes me wonder very much if WASI is already missing the mark, if polling is the solution offered.

gotta say, this is some very understandable clean code. further enhancing my sense that i really ought be playing with zig.

I was going to say, "I wonder if Bun.js would/could use this" but it looks like Jarred Sumner has been cherry-picking bits of libxev for at least six months.