Porting unix applications that used select/poll/epoll in a performant way was a common enough problem that they added WSAPoll to make things easier: http://blog

Porting unix applications that used select/poll/epoll in a performant way was a common enough problem that they added WSAPoll to make things easier: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wndp/archive/2006/10/26/wsapoll.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wndp/archive/2006/10/26/wsapoll.aspx The biggest abstraction headache is usually nonblocking file IO and DNS lookups, as many OSes don't have any support. You have to have a thread pool fallback.