There's a deeper underlying problem: the bit of code lacks any architecture. Even though libuv and others didn't exist back then, that's no excuse to just pull

There's a deeper underlying problem: the bit of code lacks any architecture. Even though libuv and others didn't exist back then, that's no excuse to just pull random descriptors from various parts of the program and stuff them in a select, repeating variants of the same logic over and over. Even creating a consistent notification/callback interface would make the code much more readable, as the underlying pattern is always the same: watch a descriptors and call a function when an event occurs. It's just lazy and ugly.