libuv is a new platform layer for Node. Its purpose is to abstract IOCP on Windows and epoll/kqueue/event ports/etc. on Unix systems. We intend to eventually contain all platform differences in this library.

http://nodejs.org/

• Non-blocking TCP sockets

• Non-blocking named pipes

• UDP

• Timers

• Child process spawning

• Asynchronous DNS via 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

• ANSI escape code controlled TTY uv_tty_t

• File system events Currently supports inotify, ReadDirectoryChangesW and kqueue. Event ports in the near future. uv_fs_event_t

• IPC and socket sharing between processes uv_write2

• Mailing list

• include/uv.h — API documentation in the form of detailed header comments.
• An Introduction to libuv — An overview of libuv with tutorials.
• LXJS 2012 talk - High-level introductory talk about libuv.
• Tests and benchmarks - API specification and usage examples.

For GCC (including MinGW) there are two methods building: via normal makefiles or via GYP. GYP is a meta-build system which can generate MSVS, Makefile, and XCode backends. It is best used for integration into other projects. The old (more stable) system is using Makefiles.

To build via Makefile simply execute:

make 

To build with Visual Studio run the vcbuilds.bat file which will checkout the GYP code into build/gyp and generate the uv.sln and related files.

Windows users can also build from cmd-line using msbuild. This is done by running vcbuild.bat from Visual Studio command prompt.

To have GYP generate build script for another system you will need to checkout GYP into the project tree manually:

svn co http://gyp.googlecode.com/svn/trunk build/gyp 

Unix users run

./gyp_uv -f make make 

Macintosh users run

./gyp_uv -f xcode xcodebuild -project uv.xcodeproj -configuration Release -target All 

Note for Linux users: compile your project with -D_GNU_SOURCE when you include uv.h. GYP builds take care of that automatically. If you use autotools, add a AC_GNU_SOURCE declaration to your configure.ac.

Microsoft Windows operating systems since Windows XP SP2. It can be built with either Visual Studio or MinGW.

Linux 2.6 using the GCC toolchain.

MacOS using the GCC or XCode toolchain.

Solaris 121 and later using GCC toolchain.