Libevent is an asynchronous event notification library that provides a mechanism to execute a callback function when a specific event occurs on a file descriptor or after a timeout has been reached.

it is meant to replace the asynchronous event loop found in event driven network servers. currently, libevent supports /dev/poll, kqueue(2), event ports, select(2), poll(2) and epoll(4).

if you want threading support and you're using pthreads, you'll need to link against the libevent_pthreads library in addition to libevent_core.