I was kinda embarrassed about making a new program with select() a few years ago. I'd rather have written something with a epoll or kpoll or something like that, but the documentation was pretty bad and I never got them to work. Anyway it doesn't need to scale, it only ever has three servers talking to it. Works great, whether I like the style or not.

Hence libevent (&c). Coding direct to select is a little like reading directly from /dev/bpf0.

That's probably fair, but beej's guide corrupted me. It's just too user-friendly. I'll look around again for the next project though.

select() has its uses and servicing a small handful of sockets is one of them. Nothing to be embarassed about.