(Disclaimer: All I know of Snabb is from reading the web site and a few discussion group posts)
Because Snabb is specialized around a few specific NICs and virtual IO interfaces with specific features, it is able to do things like set up the network hardware to be memory mapped. As in, after some setup, Snabb can bang on the bits of a specific memory range and that will change bits in the network card state without the OS or even the driver being involved. This means you are not calling send() or select(), you are dealing directly with the Intel NIC hardware interface.
It sounds a lot more like game console engine programming than node.js programming. As a game console engine programmer, that's pretty interesting to me :)
Because Snabb is specialized around a few specific NICs and virtual IO interfaces with specific features, it is able to do things like set up the network hardware to be memory mapped. As in, after some setup, Snabb can bang on the bits of a specific memory range and that will change bits in the network card state without the OS or even the driver being involved. This means you are not calling send() or select(), you are dealing directly with the Intel NIC hardware interface.
It sounds a lot more like game console engine programming than node.js programming. As a game console engine programmer, that's pretty interesting to me :)