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ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

zguide.zeromq.org

61–70 of 117 posts

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#62

ZeroMQ's variety of socket semantics is great, and it does a good job abstracting away the messy details of TCP. You can build rather complicated systems on top of it much easier and faster than you could using raw sockets. The implementation itself has some rough spots, such as the multi threading. I really like the elegance of nanomsg, but it never really got the same polish that ZeroMQ did. I wouldn't expect the s…

Pieter Hintjens @hintjens passed away in 2016.

[deleted]

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#63
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZMQ is not a replacement for sockets, it's a library that uses sockets (and other transport mechanisms) underneath. For more details: https://zguide.zeromq.org/docs/preface/#ZeroMQ-in-a-Hundred-...

When people say that they mean it's a replacement for the use of sockets in your program , not that it replaces sockets ... Across the technological landscape? Within the tech stack? Hmm.

If your program is the only user of sockets then okay, "use of sockets in your program" might be a valid assumption. But if you're interfacing with external components using sockets/whatever, using ZMQ will not solve anything. That's why I don't see it as a replacement/competing standard...

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#65

ZeroMQ's variety of socket semantics is great, and it does a good job abstracting away the messy details of TCP. You can build rather complicated systems on top of it much easier and faster than you could using raw sockets. The implementation itself has some rough spots, such as the multi threading. I really like the elegance of nanomsg, but it never really got the same polish that ZeroMQ did. I wouldn't expect the s…

Pieter Hintjens @hintjens passed away in 2016.

He wrote very frankly about his impending death, too: http://hintjens.com/blog:123

EDIT: This is the post I was looking for: http://hintjens.com/blog:115

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#66
post #16

0mq is great; however, the 0mq Guide is the golden standard for technical documentation and one of the best tech writings there are.

My only complaint with the guide so far was that it was historically presented as a single huge DokuWiki page with ambiguous heading structures (probably because the page was made of several other pages, each having top-level headings by its own). The current version looks much cleaner!

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#67
post #3

I have a feeling that ØMQ is a very good thing, but all these years I have never managed to understand what it is and what problem does it solve.

zmq is "a better socket()", but unlike sockets it's pretty hard to figure out what's going on. E.g. most (all?) socket types don't need the other side to be immediately available, it'll buffer a couple thousand or so messages and start blocking if it doesn't appear. From the app's point of view, everything seems fine until the queues are full (which you can't introspect, btw.) when suddenly everything starts blocking…

thank you. this is exactly how I feel about it.

zmq appears to be a layer that tries to hide some of the most important details that the socket layer exposes. socket programming and the state machines that tend to go along with it are some of the least difficult parts of systems programming to do well, it is well documented, well understood and there are ample tools to help measure ground truth. it was always weird to me that zmq had such a strong reputation; it basically hides what would otherwise be a few hundred lines of library code (including a framer).

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#68
post #16

0mq is great; however, the 0mq Guide is the golden standard for technical documentation and one of the best tech writings there are.

Even more impressive is that Pieter put the same attention into documenting the 0mq community's social architecture, as well: https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/social-architecture/content/

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#69

ZeroMQ's variety of socket semantics is great, and it does a good job abstracting away the messy details of TCP. You can build rather complicated systems on top of it much easier and faster than you could using raw sockets. The implementation itself has some rough spots, such as the multi threading. I really like the elegance of nanomsg, but it never really got the same polish that ZeroMQ did. I wouldn't expect the s…

> I believe the original developer passed away a few years ago?

Yeah, via euthanasia.

https://twitter.com/hintjens/status/783254242052206592?s=21

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#70
post #3

I have a feeling that ØMQ is a very good thing, but all these years I have never managed to understand what it is and what problem does it solve.

You know how people often bill sqlite as a replacement for (postgresql|mysql|oracle) but it is really best thought as a replacement for fopen()? zeromq is the same way. It's not a replacement for something like kafka or rabbitmq, it's a replacement for socket()

Zed Shaw once called it "sockets that actually work how programmers think sockets work", but I can't find a link.
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