perl-AnyEvent

The DBI of event loop programming

AnyEvent provides a uniform interface to various event loops. This allows module authors to use event loop functionality without forcing module users to use a specific event loop implementation (since more than one event loop cannot coexist peacefully). The interface itself is vaguely similar, but not identical to the Event module. During the first call of any watcher-creation method, the module tries to detect the currently loaded event loop by probing whether one of the following modules is already loaded: EV, AnyEvent::Loop, Event, Glib, Tk, Event::Lib, Qt, POE. The first one found is used. If none are detected, the module tries to load the first four modules in the order given; but note that if EV is not available, the pure-perl AnyEvent::Loop should always work, so the other two are not normally tried. Because AnyEvent first checks for modules that are already loaded, loading an event model explicitly before first using AnyEvent will likely make that model the default. For example: use Tk; use AnyEvent; The _likely_ means that, if any module loads another event model and starts using it, all bets are off - this case should be very rare though, as very few modules hardcode event loops without announcing this very loudly. The pure-perl implementation of AnyEvent is called 'AnyEvent::Loop'. Like other event modules you can load it explicitly and enjoy the high availability of that event loop :)