Shameless(-ish) plug: https://github.com/piscisaureus/wepoll is not a fat abstraction layer but it could help with windows support.

Libuv supports windows and in some ways only exists because windows support is needed; on Unix/Linux where Node started, libev was sufficient; libuv was created to facilitate the windows port of node - though it is now standing in its own right.

I know - I am one of the authors of libuv. However libuv is pretty big and imposes its own asynchronous i/o model onto your application.

Later I discovered that it is possible to do efficient epoll emulation on windows so then I wrote wepoll. With it you can just stick to the good ol' epoll/kqueue model and still support windows.

How does it work? It's not obvious how epoll could be built on top of IOCP.

It uses an ioctl that boils down to 'an overlapped version of poll()'. So the call doesn't block - instead when an event like POLLIN or POLLOUT happens, a completion is posted to the completion port.

Call this overlapped-poll function on every monitored socket individually so you don't inherit poll()s scalability problems.

See https://github.com/piscisaureus/wepoll/blob/437fb2f24ce197b4...

This is as much of an explanation I can type on my phone - I'll add more detail to the wepoll readme later.

Sure, I understand. Was just curious about how they both relate, and now I get it.