Kazuho@Cybozu Labs

I am sure many programmers writing network applications have their own abstracting layers hiding the differences between various I/O multiplex APIs, like select(2), poll(2), epoll(2), ... And of course, I am one among them.  While writing mycached (see Mycached: memcached protocol support for MySQL for more information), I was at first considering of using libev for multiplexing socket I/Os.  Libevent was not an option since it does not (yet) provide multithreading support.

But it was a great pain for me to learn how to use libev.  I do not mean that its is an ugly product.  In fact, I think that it is a very well written, excellent library.  However, for me it was too much a boring task to learn how the things are abstracted, already being familiar with the problems it tries to hide.

So instead I thought it might be a good occasion to write my own library that could be used in any programs I may write in the future.  The result is picoev, and it is faster than libevent or libev!  The benchmark used is a re-modified version taken from libev.schmorp.de/bench.html and can be found here.