Qt is moving to headless, network facing processes. It seems prudent to adopt the reactor pattern for such applications. This requires all I/O (including random file access) to be non-blocking.

This used to be difficult todo cross platform, as completion ports on windowsn are alien to unix concepts. However, node.js is facing the same issue and has started to tackle it: https://github.com/joyent/libuv, also checkout http://vimeo.com/24713213

Proposal:

Introduce a completely asynchronous I/O library based on libuv.
Possibly adopt libuv for the core event loop.

libuv is MIT licensed, but still very young. Great time to join efforts.