libpollster

Yet another wrapper for poll, epoll, kqueue, etc.

A portable library for async socket I/O and some helpful event loop features.

API

• The core "wait object" interface is in pollster.h. This provides:

  • Socket read or write readiness polling.
  • Auto-reset events, similar to Win32 CreateEvent() or Linux eventfd(2).
  • Timers.

• Atop this are some "simple" APIs for convenient asynchronous socket programming, in sockapi.h.

• TLS/SSL support for both clients and servers can be added via ssl.h.

Requirements

Building happens via the makefiles submodule.

$ git submodule update --init
$ make                             # or "gmake" on some platforms, like BSD

On Unix, the project builds with g++ 8.0 or higher (7 and earlier won't work!) or clang++.

On Windows, GNU make, nasm and msysgit should be on PATH, and the project is typically tested with VS2015 with Windows SDK 10586.

Platform support

• Linux: epoll, async DNS via getaddrinfo_a()
• FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, macOS: kqueue
• Solaris: port_create, /dev/poll
• Windows
  • Notably, this does not use I/O completion ports, but creates a separate thread for every 63 handles to call WaitForMultipleObjects(). So the Windows backend, while working, is not as good as it could be.

There is also a generic poll(2) based backend, if none of the more platform specific methods are available.

TLS support use:

• Windows: SChannel
• macOS: SecureTransport
• OpenSSL/LibreSSL etc., tested regularly on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux.