There are multiple sources your software might want to get events from. This includes timers, network sockets, filesystem changes, input events, OS signals, window events, etc.
Basically, you often would benefit from having unified access
to all of these events from single wait() or poll() call,
and handle those with a single interface.
There are C libraries that handle some of this, but I wanted to make all-around solution that uses modern C++
tldr: epoll / timerfd / eventfd / inotify / kqueue for cpp
What we want to do is
- Implement an event API
- Make it possible for user to easily add their own event types
- Make it simple to convert a system-specific interface to its cppevents equivalent (e.g. tie a BSD socket to the event system)
- Implement simple interfaces to events such as filesystem watches and timers
- Make it easy to tie library (e.g. SDL or GLFW) window events to the event system
- Support platforms other than Linux, notably Windows, OS X, *BSD and freeRTOS
What we do not want to do
- Implement entire network API for getting socket, we just handle the sockets that are given us from someplace else
- Implement entire graphics API for getting windowing events
The API is based on features available on Linux, mostly because
of the familiarity. Features supported by both Linux *fds,
inotify, epoll and BSD kqueue are the priority.
Help is wanted, especially with Windows side of things, as PO is not familiar with Windows interfaces.
- Event API implemented and workign
- It is simple to add new event types
- SDL2 tie-ins exist