libuv is a platform layer for node.js. 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.

• 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 using inotify, kqueue, event ports, FSEvents and ReadDirectoryChangesW

• 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 there are two methods building: via autotools 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.

To build with autotools:

$ sh autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make check
$ make install

To build with Visual Studio run the vcbuild.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 the command line using msbuild. This is done by running vcbuild.bat from Visual Studio command prompt.

To have GYP generate build script for another system, make sure that you have Python 2.6 or 2.7 installed, then checkout GYP into the project tree manually:

$ mkdir -p build
$ git clone https://git.chromium.org/external/gyp.git build/gyp

Unix users run:

$ ./gyp_uv -f make
$ make -C out

Macintosh users run:

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

To build for android:

$ source ./android-configure NDK_PATH gyp
$ make -C out

Note for UNIX users: compile your project with -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE and -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64. GYP builds take care of that automatically.

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. Consider using Visual Studio Express 2010 or later if you do not have a full Visual Studio license.

Linux using the GCC toolchain.

MacOS using the GCC or XCode toolchain.

Solaris 121 and later using GCC toolchain.