pevents, our implementation of Windows manual- and auto-reset events for Mac and Linux, is now officially pevents, our truly cross-platform win32 lightweight events library for Windows, Mac, Linux, and other platforms. We first released pevents way back in 2011, when we searched for and were unable to find an existing implementation of Windows events, the basic primitives for thread synchronization on Win32.
The *nix world has seen a lot of progress when it comes to non-blocking waits in recent years, but it’s very recently that purely event-driven libraries like epoll and kqueue have properly taken off. In the Windows world, it’s long-been possible to wait on filesystem and network events with WaitForMultipleObjects – a paradigm most Windows C/C++ developers are intimately familiar with. One thing that WaitForMultipleObjects (and pevents!) can also do rather neatly is wait on multiple mutexes, events, and/or semaphores simultaneously, unblocking when one or more (or all) are triggered or available.