3 ms·

ZeroMQ is quickly becoming an even bigger hammer in the premature optimization planet of Newbo-Thumbia. Edit: 1) It's a networking library; no admin tools or

by mahmud 16y ago

ZeroMQ is quickly becoming an even bigger hammer in the premature optimization planet of Newbo-Thumbia. Edit: 1) It's a networking library; no admin tools or other soft handle-bars, like user-space utilities. 2) It uses a binary protocol. Good luck debugging that with syslog. It's a very powerful tool in the hands of a capable systems architect, who actually needs it. For the rest, it's pretty much like an adult male tiger; excellent to watch in its natural habitat from a safe distance, terrible pet idea for you and your fiancee (and not because you live in a studio apartment.)

bretthoerner 16y ago
Is it? I thought this was a level of abstraction higher? The premature optimizer would want access to the raw sockets this is built ontop of. I could be misunderstanding, though, I've never used it. The idea I have in my head is, ZeroMQ: Send a message, other side either receives full message as a single payload (or nothing at all? or an error is raised? I'm not tototally sure). Sockets: write(), read() and friends. Other side has to make sure he has the whole message, otherwise read() again and wait, deal with errors on its own, etc.
- mahmud 16y ago
  I have seen higher-level libraries than Zero, I have seen middle-ware with better persistence than Zero, I have seen networking libraries better integrated with their languages than Zero. But I haven't seen a faster beast. It's right there in their <title/>: "Fastest. Messaging. Ever". The great majority of the people would just benefit from learning socket programming better, and sticking to something native to their tongue. Use the messaging infrastructure that integrates best with your development process, or opt for something with more padding, like Rabbit. Call me weak, but I like infrastructure software whose guts I can peek, lsof, cat, grep, log, strace and diff. Stuff that I can take a snapshot of and reproduce. Network services should be transparent to the application code base. I wanna poke a whole in my firewall, give some hint to inetd, a few lines of cron and be done with it. I simply don't trust my own software enough to be sure I will not screw up the infrastructure.
  - bretthoerner 16y ago
    I completely agree with the desire to be able to use Unix As It Should Be. That said I am a little envious when I read that I can send("bunch of shit") and receive() and call it a day. I wouldn't call that premature optimization, nothing is going to beat raw sockets and domain specific knowledge. That said, since you brought up AMQP (we use Rabbit, too, I'm a fan) have you seen this?: http://lists.zeromq.org/pipermail/openamq-dev/2010-March/001598.html http://lists.zeromq.org/pipermail/openamq-dev/2010-March/001...
    - mahmud 16y ago
      First, function level semantics and brevity are not exactly differentiators when most anyone can wrap the socket API with the class/parametric/duck-typed interface of their choice (what is github if not a pile of DWIM wrappers.) See how Twisted did wonders for network programming at the semantic level. Also, I have already stated that it was a powerful tool in the hands of a "capable systems architect". Besides, I am a closet iMatix fan ;-) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1230509 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1230509 All I wanted to point out is that ZeroMQ should not be treated as another "plugin" that people are encouraged to use willy nilly. I would use it in high-performance applications in financial trading, VOIP, scalable game servers, etc. But these are not what most people are working on. Blog posts like these just encourage the ADHD bleeding-edge types to take another stab at their own thighs in the unjustified pursuit of "web scale". And the moment SmashingMag gets a hold of Zero, we will see the most gruesome newbie bloodshed since the battle of WordPress.
      - phintjens 16y ago
        Lol. Actually I believe 0MQ (or rather, the principles it embodies) is something all serious developers need to learn. How to do concurrency properly, how to get above TCP sockets, how to design simple APIs, how to do open source properly, etc. It's hard to see that exposure to 0MQ would make anyone a worse developer. As a programmer, using 0MQ is Better than Sex. You can quote me on that. It would be unethical to deny such fun to anyone. What beginners need, with any new technology, is a set of clear recipes that they can implement without having to invent everything. This was why a books like Stevens' trilogy were so vital to getting TCP out of labs and into the grubby hands of ADHD bleeding-edge types. We're working on that, with books like http://www.zeromq.org/docs:user-guide http://www.zeromq.org/docs:user-guide. That'll grow to cover all of 0MQ eventually.
dtf 16y ago
It's got absolutely nothing to do with optimization, it just happens to be rather fast. As far as I know, there is know other tool out there, fast or slow, that offers zeromq's level of simplicity. 1) It's a networking library Yes, but one that's easy to use. Versus BSD sockets, which have an annoying array of quirks when programming for multiple platforms. Moreover, it's consistent whatever your transport. One thing I've found using zeromq is that, because it's so simple to use, it makes you want to think in terms of message passing. I use a queue to push messages between threads at practically no cost. Then later if I feel like it I can shunt the consumer to a different process, or a different host, or several different hosts with a load balancer. I could do the same with raw sockets, but I'd rather eat my own leg with a spoon. 2) It uses a binary protocol. Good luck debugging that with syslog. It's just a packet. You can put whatever you want in it: XML, JSON, protocol buffers, msgpack, JPEG.... The wire protocol is trivial. It also has jolly nice bindings for Python, Ruby, Lua etc, allowing you to bridge between C or C++ and your scripted components with zero hassle. Go on, give it a go.
- aaronblohowiak 16y ago
  "As far as I know, there is know other tool out there, fast or slow, that offers zeromq's level of simplicity." STOMP! Stomp is simpler than 0mq, but you have a central server instead of point to point.
  - sustrik 16y ago
    Not really. Compare 0MQ's wire protocol: http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:2 http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:2 and STOMP: http://stomp.codehaus.org/Protocol http://stomp.codehaus.org/Protocol
aaronblohowiak 16y ago
The easy deployment, easy snooping and administrative tools are all big wins for STOMP on ActiveMQ, even if it doesn't hit millions of messages a second.

by mahmud 16y ago

bretthoerner 16y ago

Is it? I thought this was a level of abstraction higher? The premature optimizer would want access to the raw sockets this is built ontop of. I could be misunderstanding, though, I've never used it. The idea I have in my head is, ZeroMQ: Send a message, other side either receives full message as a single payload (or nothing at all? or an error is raised? I'm not tototally sure). Sockets: write(), read() and friends. Other side has to make sure he has the whole message, otherwise read() again and wait, deal with errors on its own, etc.

mahmud 16y ago
I have seen higher-level libraries than Zero, I have seen middle-ware with better persistence than Zero, I have seen networking libraries better integrated with their languages than Zero. But I haven't seen a faster beast. It's right there in their <title/>: "Fastest. Messaging. Ever". The great majority of the people would just benefit from learning socket programming better, and sticking to something native to their tongue. Use the messaging infrastructure that integrates best with your development process, or opt for something with more padding, like Rabbit. Call me weak, but I like infrastructure software whose guts I can peek, lsof, cat, grep, log, strace and diff. Stuff that I can take a snapshot of and reproduce. Network services should be transparent to the application code base. I wanna poke a whole in my firewall, give some hint to inetd, a few lines of cron and be done with it. I simply don't trust my own software enough to be sure I will not screw up the infrastructure.
- bretthoerner 16y ago
  I completely agree with the desire to be able to use Unix As It Should Be. That said I am a little envious when I read that I can send("bunch of shit") and receive() and call it a day. I wouldn't call that premature optimization, nothing is going to beat raw sockets and domain specific knowledge. That said, since you brought up AMQP (we use Rabbit, too, I'm a fan) have you seen this?: http://lists.zeromq.org/pipermail/openamq-dev/2010-March/001598.html http://lists.zeromq.org/pipermail/openamq-dev/2010-March/001...
  - mahmud 16y ago
    First, function level semantics and brevity are not exactly differentiators when most anyone can wrap the socket API with the class/parametric/duck-typed interface of their choice (what is github if not a pile of DWIM wrappers.) See how Twisted did wonders for network programming at the semantic level. Also, I have already stated that it was a powerful tool in the hands of a "capable systems architect". Besides, I am a closet iMatix fan ;-) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1230509 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1230509 All I wanted to point out is that ZeroMQ should not be treated as another "plugin" that people are encouraged to use willy nilly. I would use it in high-performance applications in financial trading, VOIP, scalable game servers, etc. But these are not what most people are working on. Blog posts like these just encourage the ADHD bleeding-edge types to take another stab at their own thighs in the unjustified pursuit of "web scale". And the moment SmashingMag gets a hold of Zero, we will see the most gruesome newbie bloodshed since the battle of WordPress.
    - phintjens 16y ago
      Lol. Actually I believe 0MQ (or rather, the principles it embodies) is something all serious developers need to learn. How to do concurrency properly, how to get above TCP sockets, how to design simple APIs, how to do open source properly, etc. It's hard to see that exposure to 0MQ would make anyone a worse developer. As a programmer, using 0MQ is Better than Sex. You can quote me on that. It would be unethical to deny such fun to anyone. What beginners need, with any new technology, is a set of clear recipes that they can implement without having to invent everything. This was why a books like Stevens' trilogy were so vital to getting TCP out of labs and into the grubby hands of ADHD bleeding-edge types. We're working on that, with books like http://www.zeromq.org/docs:user-guide http://www.zeromq.org/docs:user-guide. That'll grow to cover all of 0MQ eventually.

dtf 16y ago

It's got absolutely nothing to do with optimization, it just happens to be rather fast. As far as I know, there is know other tool out there, fast or slow, that offers zeromq's level of simplicity. 1) It's a networking library Yes, but one that's easy to use. Versus BSD sockets, which have an annoying array of quirks when programming for multiple platforms. Moreover, it's consistent whatever your transport. One thing I've found using zeromq is that, because it's so simple to use, it makes you want to think in terms of message passing. I use a queue to push messages between threads at practically no cost. Then later if I feel like it I can shunt the consumer to a different process, or a different host, or several different hosts with a load balancer. I could do the same with raw sockets, but I'd rather eat my own leg with a spoon. 2) It uses a binary protocol. Good luck debugging that with syslog. It's just a packet. You can put whatever you want in it: XML, JSON, protocol buffers, msgpack, JPEG.... The wire protocol is trivial. It also has jolly nice bindings for Python, Ruby, Lua etc, allowing you to bridge between C or C++ and your scripted components with zero hassle. Go on, give it a go.

aaronblohowiak 16y ago
"As far as I know, there is know other tool out there, fast or slow, that offers zeromq's level of simplicity." STOMP! Stomp is simpler than 0mq, but you have a central server instead of point to point.
- sustrik 16y ago
  Not really. Compare 0MQ's wire protocol: http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:2 http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:2 and STOMP: http://stomp.codehaus.org/Protocol http://stomp.codehaus.org/Protocol

aaronblohowiak 16y ago

The easy deployment, easy snooping and administrative tools are all big wins for STOMP on ActiveMQ, even if it doesn't hit millions of messages a second.