libevent/libevent

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

11942 stars · 3464 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

libevent is a C library providing a portable event notification API that executes callbacks on file descriptor events, timeouts, and signals. It replaces hand-written event loops in event-driven network servers and includes buffered I/O, DNS, HTTP, and a minimal RPC framework.

Use cases

• write a high-performance event-driven network server in C
• replace select/poll event loops with a portable abstraction
• build an async HTTP server or client
• handle timers and signals in a single event loop
• write multi-threaded networked applications with scalable I/O
• implement DNS or minimal RPC protocols

When to choose

• you need a mature, portable C event loop across Linux, BSD, macOS, and Windows
• you want epoll/kqueue/select abstraction without rewriting your event loop
• you need buffered network I/O with SSL, rate-limiting, or zero-copy file transmission
• you are building a dependency for other software (e.g., Tor, memcached-style servers)

When to avoid

• you are in a language with built-in async runtimes (Node.js, Go, Rust tokio)
• you need a full-featured HTTP framework rather than a low-level event library
• you want a modern coroutine/async-await programming model
• your project is not in C/C++ and binding overhead matters

Facets

library · maturity stable

networking concurrency http-server rpc caching networking developer-tools backend cross-platform windows bsd cross-platform c event-loop async-io epoll kqueue bufferevents dns c10k linux macos

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