Migrate the RTS to use libuv (or libev, or libevent)
This is mainly a reference discussion ticket.
libuv (https://github.com/joyent/libuv) is a lightweight library which allows asynchronous IO across OpenBSD, Linux, Darwin, Windows etc by utilizing the fastest implementation on each system (epoll, kqueue, IOCP, event ports). These specialized IO polling methods are much faster on their respective platforms than just using select() like the RTS currently does.
Additionally, it also provides cross platform threads, mutex, condition vars, terminal input/output and term settings w/ cross platform ANSI escape code handling, thread pools, cross platform HRC's etc. It's currently significantly faster than libevent and slightly faster than libev (and no doubt faster than rolling our own stuff). Because it's maintained and utilized heavily by Node.js it's in extremely active and maintained development.
Rewriting a portion of the RTS to utilize libuv would have the following benefits;
- We could ditch basically all of our platform specific code. Everything under rts/win32 and rts/posix, except the SEH stuff, could be deleted.
- libuv is tuned for speed on each platform. This would be an optimization to all our async IO stuff.
Trac metadata
| Trac field | Value |
|---|---|
| Version | |
| Type | FeatureRequest |
| TypeOfFailure | OtherFailure |
| Priority | normal |
| Resolution | Unresolved |
| Component | Runtime System |
| Test case | |
| Differential revisions | |
| BlockedBy | |
| Related | |
| Blocking | |
| CC | simonmar |
| Operating system | |
| Architecture |