libuv/libuv

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

27131 stars · 3924 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

libuv is a cross-platform C library providing asynchronous I/O via a full-featured event loop backed by epoll, kqueue, IOCP, and event ports. Originally built for Node.js, it also powers Luvit, Julia, and uvloop, offering async TCP/UDP sockets, DNS resolution, file system operations, threading, and child process management.

Use cases

• write a cross-platform async TCP server in C
• build an event loop for a scripting language runtime
• perform asynchronous file system operations portably
• watch for file system changes on Linux and Windows
• run background work on a thread pool
• resolve DNS asynchronously in a native application
• spawn and manage child processes cross-platform

When to choose

• you need a battle-tested, portable async I/O layer in C or C++
• you are building a runtime, interpreter, or server that needs an event loop
• you want one API covering epoll, kqueue, and IOCP without platform-specific code
• you need stable ABI and SemVer guarantees for long-lived native dependencies

When to avoid

• you are writing high-level application code where a language-native async runtime is easier
• you need only simple blocking I/O and don't want an event loop dependency
• you want a pure-Windows or pure-Unix API with deeper platform-specific features

Facets

library · maturity stable

concurrency networking file-system developer-tools developer-tools cross-platform networking operating-systems windows cross-platform cpp c event-loop async-io c-library nodejs tcp udp dns thread-pool linux macos

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