Another library worth mentioning is https://github.com/h2o/h2o
1: This of course presupposes you know, or are willing to learn, Rust. That said, given what you've explained about libuv, the total time to grok libuv's code base and the time to learn Rust may be similar, but learning Rust may pay more dividends?
To build H2O as a library you will need to install the following dependencies:
libuv version 1.0 or above OpenSSL version 1.0.2 or above
As I understand it, regular h2o doesn't require libuv but libh2o does.