Modern Systems Programming with Scala Native

Streaming File Input in libuv

In the POSIX model, we could treat pipes and files more or less interchangeably and use the same blocking I/O patterns, such as fgets and println, with either one. But in libuv, files are a totally different beast from anything else we’ve encountered. Because ordinary disk files are not pollable for readiness in Linux, there’s no way to read or write from a file without the risk of blocking.

libuv provides an alternative: a background thread pool for running UNIX-style system calls, where blocking calls can run without interfering with our event loop. These system calls are not modeled as streams, though. Each call is one-off, which means we’ll need to do a little extra work to create something that fits our