zig-libuv VS libxev

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 used to use libuv, 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 memory 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 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.

io_uring support is obviously great & excellent, fulfills the "high performance" part well.

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.

You might be interested in a pure Zig implementation of these primitives by Mitchell in his libxev library: https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev

https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev

- one from the Tigerbeetle DB