Install libevent with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository

Commands and aliases

• event_rpcgen.py

Project history

The libevent site describes the library as a replacement for hand-written event loops in network servers: programs register callbacks for file-descriptor readiness, timers, signals, and higher-level buffered I/O rather than hard-coding select or poll loops. The site credits maintenance to Nick Mathewson, Azat Khuzhin, and Niels Provos.

The project grew around the C10K-era problem of serving many simultaneous connections portably across backends such as select, poll, epoll, kqueue, /dev/poll, Solaris event ports, and Windows APIs. Over time it added buffered network I/O, DNS, HTTP, RPC, SSL-capable bufferevents, thread hooks, and extensive portability code.

Adoption history

The official site lists widely used downstreams including Chromium, memcached, Transmission, NTP's SNTP code, tmux, Tor, Prosody, PgBouncer, and coturn. That breadth made libevent one of the standard C event-loop dependencies in Unix package collections.

How it is used

Typical applications create an event_base, register events or bufferevents, and run event_base_dispatch. The official documentation covers setup, event bases, timers, buffered I/O, asynchronous DNS, embedded HTTP servers, and RPC support.

Why package nerds care

libevent is package-nerd-famous because it abstracts the messy portability matrix behind scalable C networking. It is old enough to show up in classic daemons and new enough to have ABI/API reports, split libraries, CMake and autotools history, and long-lived 1.4, 2.0, and 2.1 release lines.

Timeline

• 2009: Niels Provos announced libevent 1.4.12-stable and libevent 2.0.2-alpha on July 29, 2009.
• 2010: The libevent site lists libevent-1.4.14b-stable released June 7, 2010.
• 2012: The libevent site lists the first 2.1.x alpha release on April 3, 2012 and libevent-2.0.21-stable released November 18, 2012.
• 2014: The libevent site lists libevent-2.0.22-stable released January 5, 2014.
• 2017: The libevent site lists libevent-2.1.8-stable released January 22, 2017.
• 2020: The libevent site lists libevent-2.1.12-stable released July 5, 2020.
• 2023: The libevent site lists libevent-2.2.1-alpha-dev released May 21, 2023.

Related projects

• Related event-loop and networking projects include libev, libuv, Boost.Asio, and downstream users such as Tor, memcached, tmux, Transmission, Chromium, PgBouncer, and coturn.

Sources

• https://github.com/libevent/libevent
• https://libevent.org/
• https://libevent.org/doc/
• https://libevent.org/libevent-book/
• https://www.provos.org/p/new-libevent-releases/