libuv VS liburing

I wound up on a different team with pre-existing Python code so temporarily shelved my use of Go for a bit, and we used Sanic (an async Python framework built on top of the excellent uvloop & libuv that also powers Node.js) to build some APIs for live channel management & operations. We hand-wrote our OpenAPI and used it to generate documentation and a CLI, which was an improvement over what was there (or not) before. Other teams used the OpenAPI document to generate SDKs to interact with our service.

In the source code of the Node.js opensource project, lib folder contains JavaScript code, mostly wrappers over C++ and function definitions. On the contrary, src folder contains C++ implementations of the functions, which pulls dependencies from the V8 project, the libuv project, the zlib project, the llhttp project, and many more - which are all placed at the deps folder.

Libuv, the C library that gives Node.js its asynchronous, non-blocking I/O capability is responsible for managing the thread pool. Node.js gives you the capability of using additional threads for computationally expensive and long-lasting operations to avoid blocking the event loop.

Node.js is written in C, C++, and JavaScript. The core components of Node.js - the V8 engine and the libuv library - are written in C++ and C, respectively, since these languages provide low-level access to system resources, making them well-suited for building high-performance and efficient applications. JavaScript is mainly used to write the application logic.

x8 apparently https://github.com/libuv/libuv/pull/3952

Notably upgrades to libuv 1.45 which has io_uring support. Faster file system access! Awhh yeah, it's on.

Remarkable what a mild & unintrusive PR adding io_uring was. https://github.com/libuv/libuv/pull/3952

Well, the single-threaded nature ultimately leads to its biggest downfall. Node.js utilizes a synchronous event loop engineered using Libuv that takes in code from the call stack and executes it.

I've tinkered around with io_uring on and off for the last couple years. But I think it's really becoming quite cool (not that it wasn't cool before... :)). This was a really interesting post on what's new https://github.com/axboe/liburing/wiki/io_uring-and-networki.... The combination of ring-mapped buffers and multi-shot operations has some really interesting applications for high-performance networking. Hoping over the next year or two we can start to see really bleeding edge networking perf without having to resort to using DPDK :)

Thought I was doing something wrong at first, but after looking at examples and code, I just wasn't able to reach the epoll numbers. Looking on the Github page, there a few issues there with people who found the same thing, with their own examples. #1, #2

To address my own silly questions, yes, one should use the new fixed buffers described in this document: https://github.com/axboe/liburing/wiki/io_uring-and-networki...

We're working on this! https://github.com/axboe/liburing/issues/830

Link: https://github.com/axboe/liburing/wiki/io_uring-and-networking-in-2023