Modern Systems Programming with Scala Native

Introducing libuv

libuv’s C API provides a lot of functions. In many ways it serves as a replacement for much of the standard library of a traditional UNIX operating system, so that’s not too surprising. What’s fascinating, though, is how few basic concepts libuv relies upon to provide a consistent programming model over a wide variety of different I/O scenarios: clients and server, sockets and pipes, TCP and UDP. There are three fundamental building blocks to libuv:

• The event loop
• Handles
• Callbacks

They fit together like so: pipes and the like are represented as handles, and registered onto the event loop. The event loop is responsible for monitoring each handle. When an event occurs, a user-specified callback function is invoked with the data ...