libuv status report

We announced back in July that with Microsoft's support Joyent would be porting Node to Windows. This effort is ongoing but I thought it would be nice to make a status report post about the new platform library libuv which has resulted from porting Node to Windows.

libuv's purpose is to abstract platform-dependent code in Node into one place where it can be tested for correctness and performance before bindings to V8 are added. Since Node is totally non-blocking, libuv turns out to be a rather useful library itself: a BSD-licensed, minimal, high-performance, cross-platform networking library.

We attempt to not reinvent the wheel where possible. The entire Unix backend sits heavily on Marc Lehmann's beautiful libraries libev and libeio. For DNS we integrated with Daniel Stenberg's C-Ares. For cross-platform build-system support we're relying on Chrome's GYP meta-build system.

The current implemented features are:

• Non-blocking TCP sockets (using IOCP on Windows)
• Non-blocking named pipes
• UDP
• Timers
• Child process spawning
• Asynchronous DNS via c-ares or uv_getaddrinfo.
• Asynchronous file system APIs uv_fs_*
• High resolution time uv_hrtime
• Current executable path look up uv_exepath
• Thread pool scheduling uv_queue_work

The features we are working on still are

• File system events (Currently supports inotify, ReadDirectoryChangesW and will support kqueue and event ports in the near future.) uv_fs_event_t
• VT100 TTY uv_tty_t
• Socket sharing between processes uv_ipc_t (planned API)

For complete documentation see the header file: include/uv.h. There are a number of tests in the test directory which demonstrate the API.

libuv supports Microsoft Windows operating systems since Windows XP SP2. It can be built with either Visual Studio or MinGW. Solaris 121 and later using GCC toolchain. Linux 2.6 or better using the GCC toolchain. Macinotsh Darwin using the GCC or XCode toolchain. It is known to work on the BSDs but we do not check the build regularly.

In addition to Node v0.5, a number of projects have begun to use libuv:

• Mozilla's Rust
• Tim Caswell's LuaNode
• Ben Noordhuis and Bert Belder's Phode async PHP project
• Kerry Snyder's libuv-csharp
• Andrea Lattuada's web server

We hope to see more people contributing and using libuv in the future!