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ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

zguide.zeromq.org

71–80 of 117 posts

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#71

In 2015, in one project one "clever" co-worker decided to use "zeromq" in project where is the guarantee of delivery was must. I think that because he wanted to attach this technology as fancy stuff in his cv. Later he left and we had to rewrite message sending and converted to basic http.

About the same time, I used zeromq in a project for similar reasons:

- I wanted easy message framing - I didn't know much about networks - HTTP servers that can be embedded in C++ aren't great, and I didn't know anything about HTTP - It is nice that you can ignore application startup order if you don't care much about reliability, which I didn't

If I knew then what I know now, I would probably have picked something else. For one, I couldn't make it integrate with my main event loop, so I had it block in another thread, and that caused a problem of inter-thread communication that was nearly as bad as the original problem, for me as an inexperienced noobie.

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#72
Ø is a vowel and a letter used in the Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Southern Sami languages. (Wikipedia)

It’s not an unused letter that you can snap up as a cool way to write zero. People will read it, some will recognize it and assume it has meaning, because it has. That’s how letters work.

There are zeroes with dashes through them, but if you look closely they almost always take care to keep the dash inside the (non-)circle zero to make the difference clearer.

I realize most people in the world won’t care about this, but with Northern European eyes, this looks stupid.

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#73

I have to say that I have never really had a positive impression of zeromq. I feel like it is particularly unsuccessful and that seems to be for some pretty good reasons. Zeromq is a bag of tools and it's not really clear to me how a novice would put them together safely. This is important for a message system because everyone has to start somewhere and it really shouldn't be "step 1: build your broker with our subro…

I agree. The basic interface design seems really neat but it's so easy to run into horrible problems with it. For one it doesn't really deal with errors very well: once you've thrown a message into it there's basically no mechanism to know if something goes wrong with it (and it certainly used to just straight up assert in many, many error cases, which sure made it hard to use the 'reliable central broker' mechanism they advocate in the docs). The implementation is also really brittle: it's basically trivial to cause all kinds of misbehaviour if the other end does not act as expected. The problem is there isn't really many good alternatives that are actually similar. Other 'message queues' are basically big databases, not a library. I feel there's room for something with the same philosophy but better execution.

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#74

I have to say that I have never really had a positive impression of zeromq. I feel like it is particularly unsuccessful and that seems to be for some pretty good reasons. Zeromq is a bag of tools and it's not really clear to me how a novice would put them together safely. This is important for a message system because everyone has to start somewhere and it really shouldn't be "step 1: build your broker with our subro…

ZeroMQ is used heavily in the backend of Jupyter and allows for a huge variety of non-Python kernels. It's brokerless, which sets it apart from all the other things you listed here.

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#75
post #72

Ø is a vowel and a letter used in the Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Southern Sami languages. (Wikipedia) It’s not an unused letter that you can snap up as a cool way to write zero. People will read it, some will recognize it and assume it has meaning, because it has. That’s how letters work. There are zeroes with dashes through them, but if you look closely they almost always take care to keep the dash inside the (…

Incidentally...

> The Ø in ZeroMQ is all about tradeoffs. On the one hand this strange name lowers ZeroMQ’s visibility on Google and Twitter. On the other hand it annoys the heck out of some Danish folk who write us things like “ØMG røtfl”, and “Ø is not a funny looking zero!” and “Rødgrød med fløde!”, which is apparently an insult that means “may your neighbours be the direct descendants of Grendel!” Seems like a fair trade.

https://zguide.zeromq.org/docs/preface/

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#76
post #72

Ø is a vowel and a letter used in the Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Southern Sami languages. (Wikipedia) It’s not an unused letter that you can snap up as a cool way to write zero. People will read it, some will recognize it and assume it has meaning, because it has. That’s how letters work. There are zeroes with dashes through them, but if you look closely they almost always take care to keep the dash inside the (…

The ∅ symbol (U+2205 in Unicode), even though it's inspired by, is not the same as the letter Ø (U+00D8 in Unicode), and has been, for almost a century already, the "correct" way to represent an empty set in mathematical notation (alongside {}).

That is the meaning everyone that does not primarily use the Northern European alphabet (aka most people in the world) assume it has.

Maybe suppress your instinctive outrage next time, or if you really need to be angry at something, at least direct it at the right place: the dead mathematician who proposed it [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Weil

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#77
We are using 0mq for monitoring of electric vehicles fleet. Millions of messages every day (hundreds of GB), zero problems with bad internet connection (common in moving vehicles). Every sent message is received regardless of connectivity issues. Just a little implementation annoyances here and there but it is serving us well since 2015.

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#78
post #53
post #48

I am actually using it in production as an easy mechanism to add non critical rpc calls between services. The only thing I can say about it is that zeromq hasn't given me a reason to look for a replacement. Yet.

nice, we're also using it for rpc calls using protobuffs.

The fact that it just works, and very easy to add endpoints, made it a no-brainer. I might not leave it alone with my kids but it works great as an RPC pipe.

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#79

I have to say that I have never really had a positive impression of zeromq. I feel like it is particularly unsuccessful and that seems to be for some pretty good reasons. Zeromq is a bag of tools and it's not really clear to me how a novice would put them together safely. This is important for a message system because everyone has to start somewhere and it really shouldn't be "step 1: build your broker with our subro…

As someone who's written more than my fair share of messaging code using a bunch of different middleware and frameworks, I've never really understood where ZeroMQ is supposed to fit. It's high-level enough that you have to learn something completely different than plain sockets (and have more stuff to debug when it breaks), while also being low-level enough that it can't provide many of the features I'd expect out of a message-oriented middleware-- no message broker, no anonymous pub-sub, no reliable transport, etc. unless you go and build them yourself (which they provide documentation and patterns for, but they're not things you get for free like you would with other frameworks).

"Bag of tools" is about right. Where RabbitMQ/AMQP or MQTT or DDS can, depending on exactly what I want to do, provide me an end-to-end solution where, with a bit of configuration and network management, throw in a message and expect it to go where I want it to, ZeroMQ hands me a pile of pieces with which I can, presumably, build a thing that will do the same thing. That's not something I've ever found that I need-- either one of the premade solutions fills my needs, or I go and write something myself and skip ZeroMQ.

Re: ØMQ – The Guide (2011)

#80

Ø - The 28. Letter in the Norwegian alphabet, pronounced as the beginning of the sound ‘uuuuh’ (like when someone is making a sound when thinking). It’s a join between O and E, and was at first written as Ө. The same sound in Swedish is Ö

Or, you know, U+2205, the mathematical "empty set" notation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_sign

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