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Nanomsg postmortem and other stories

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Re: Nanomsg postmortem and other stories

#11

Post by kinofcain »

IshKebab wrote: post #5

Yeah I dunno, the "solid technical reasons" are pretty unconvincing. The reasons are: 1. Exceptions are awkward because they separate the error handling from the context that is usually required to correctly handle an error (i.e. where it occured). 2. Exceptions are the only reasonable way for a constructor to fail. You can't return error codes from a constructor. I actually agree with the point about exceptions, and…

Boost has variant, which is also a discriminated Union though the visitor pattern ergonomics aren't quite as nice as result in rust or doing the same thing with enums in swift. There's work to get something like variant into the standard.

Re: Nanomsg postmortem and other stories

#12

Post by _pmf_ »

So, what is the spiritual successor of 0mq?

I think a lot of use cases that would have been covered by 0mq are now handled by more higher level abstractions like consensus protocols or more heavy weight message queues (which absolutely makes sense), but what would be a modern (i.e. maintained) alternative for the simple "pub-sub via TCP" use case of 0mq?

Re: Nanomsg postmortem and other stories

#13

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

seiji wrote: post #9
ctstover wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? The whole thing used to be about fun. Like, "hey look at this!". Do you really need press secretary and events coordinator? If you were running a business, yes. That was the entire concept of enterprises like Red Hat and Canonical, even parts of Intel and IBM. That is, repackage and support semi-organized hackery. Again, we don't want to devolve into the bureaucracies F/OSS usurped. (Ideas + fun + seeking pre…

It's a matter of scale. Of course you can put anything you want up online (and you should!). But, if you have (or expect to have) millions of users, then one person sitting alone saying "ME ME ME" doesn't cut it. It stops being less about fun when your company loses $10,000 per minute of downtime and you suffer an outage because you are operating "at-scale" (256 GB RAM to 1 TB RAM, thousands of clustered servers, mul…

It doesn't seem wise to take a project run by volunteers with little/no funding and expect it to run at enterprise scale.

If it's that valuable, fork it and fix it yourself.

Expecting an implied commercial-level SLA from one person's hobby project makes no sense at all to me.

Re: Nanomsg postmortem and other stories

#16

Post by ctstover »

seiji wrote: post #9
ctstover wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? The whole thing used to be about fun. Like, "hey look at this!". Do you really need press secretary and events coordinator? If you were running a business, yes. That was the entire concept of enterprises like Red Hat and Canonical, even parts of Intel and IBM. That is, repackage and support semi-organized hackery. Again, we don't want to devolve into the bureaucracies F/OSS usurped. (Ideas + fun + seeking pre…

It's a matter of scale. Of course you can put anything you want up online (and you should!). But, if you have (or expect to have) millions of users, then one person sitting alone saying "ME ME ME" doesn't cut it. It stops being less about fun when your company loses $10,000 per minute of downtime and you suffer an outage because you are operating "at-scale" (256 GB RAM to 1 TB RAM, thousands of clustered servers, mul…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlMwc1c0HRQ

Re: Nanomsg postmortem and other stories

#17

Post by sovande »

seiji wrote: post #2

nanomsg was an interesting successor to the bloated/C++/LGPL zmq, but it succumbed to old ways that don't work anymore. It's 2016 and you can't run an (intended) global-scale open source project by just being "code nerd in chief." If you can't run an open feedback-driven community and if you can't be chief architect (also means communicating plans constantly, not just 'do whatever you want') and if you don't possess…

99.99% of open source project does not and cannot match these expectations and it is so out of touch with reality just to assume so. Most successful open source project (apart from the well known 0.1%) are run by 1-2 maintainers and contribution from the so called community amounts to a few percent of the total work at best - look at the contributors graph of popular github project.

Unless projects are able to bootstrap themselves into a business (wordpress) or are eventually supported by a commercial entity (llvm) they will be fireflies that shines for a short while until the creator/maintainer does a reality check and realise how much time and work he has put into this with nothing much in return eacept a mile long issue list on github, lots of unfriendly noise and arguments from the community and insane expectations from users like yourself.

Re: Nanomsg postmortem and other stories

#18

Post by skybrian »

It seems like for side projects that don't have an active community, the only viable approach is to set expectations right up front that it's abandonware. That is, write it, release it, and walk away. No future implied, unless someone volunteers to turn it into a real project.

Example: this is what most researchers do - they don't maintain the code after the paper is published.

Re: Nanomsg postmortem and other stories

#19

Post by seiji »

sovande wrote: post #17
seiji wrote: post #2

nanomsg was an interesting successor to the bloated/C++/LGPL zmq, but it succumbed to old ways that don't work anymore. It's 2016 and you can't run an (intended) global-scale open source project by just being "code nerd in chief." If you can't run an open feedback-driven community and if you can't be chief architect (also means communicating plans constantly, not just 'do whatever you want') and if you don't possess…

99.99% of open source project does not and cannot match these expectations and it is so out of touch with reality just to assume so. Most successful open source project (apart from the well known 0.1%) are run by 1-2 maintainers and contribution from the so called community amounts to a few percent of the total work at best - look at the contributors graph of popular github project. Unless projects are able to bootst…

a mile long issue list on github,

If you have enough users to have "too many issues to handle," then you're big enough that you need an official governance and contribution structure. You're also big enough where you'll have a pool of high quality contributors to promote to project-level-oversight status.

Nobody is saying "do all this work for free forever," but people are saying: "You have too much work you're avoiding. Why refuse to let other people help?" Once you reach a million users this isn't your private software anymore, it belongs to the community and you need to step up and allow faster development than one person can handle alone.

Re: Nanomsg postmortem and other stories

#20

Post by CrLf »

What I don't really understand is what's fundamentally wrong with ZeroMQ to warrant such forks. The project has a large user base and is very established. What's unfixable about it?

It was pretty obvious to me that nanomsg had very little chance to thrive. For an outsider what's so radically different about any ZeroMQ competitor?

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