[zeromq-dev] Fail fast

[Martin Hurton]

Hi Robin,

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 7:47 PM, Robin Weisberg<robin.weisberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thats very good news, thanks. Is there an API I can look at?
>
> The link in this email:
> http://lists.zeromq.org/pipermail/zeromq-dev/2009-June/000865.html
> doesn't seem to work. I checked out trunk and zsock_refactoring and it isn't
> clear to me where I should be looking.

You can browse the project's repository at
http://svn.fastmq.org/svn/zsock/. Please note that this is work in
progress.

>
> Also I'd be interested if you have a rough timeline for support of multicast
> via java on windows and c++ on linux. If any of it is working in svn I might
> check it out. Is there a different JIRA for this project? I couldn't find
> any releases related to it on http://jira.fastmq.org/.
>
> Thanks!
> Robin
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 2:46 AM, Martin Hurton <hurtonm at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Robin,
>>
>> There is a refactoring of ZeroMQ underway and among other things it
>> addresses this problem too. Namely, in non-fatal cases, error codes
>> are used rather then asserts.
>>
>> - Martin
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 4:09 PM, Robin Weisberg<robin.weisberg at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > I'm going to take a risk and put in my 2 cents on the zeromq fail fast
>> > implementation. I know these things can get religious and once people
>> > get
>> > down one path its difficult to change their minds but I feel duty bound
>> > to
>> > try... :)
>> >
>> > <2c>
>> > I'm OK with crashing when a library is being misused BUT things like
>> > passing
>> > in bad hostnames on initialization or binding to names that don't exist
>> > should result in an error code or exception being returned instead of
>> > crashing. If you ignore the error code and try to use an uninitialized
>> > object THEN you can crash since the developer is misusing the library.
>> > Very
>> > often this stuff is setup in config files or gui's and instead of giving
>> > the
>> > user (who may not be a developer) a chance to fix it you are crashing
>> > the
>> > gui or the whole process (which may be doing other things if you allow
>> > these
>> > things to be configured at runtime).
>> >
>> > Making me write code to validate all the things going into the api calls
>> > I'm
>> > making by doing dnslookups validating ports are open is a huge hassle
>> > and
>> > just doubles the work load. Its also not guaranteed to work, for example
>> > I
>> > can check if the zmq_server is up, but by the time I make the api call
>> > to
>> > connect to it went down and my app crashes instead of giving it a chance
>> > to
>> > reconnect gracefully, pop up an error dialog etc.
>> >
>> > Also I've found I have to open up the zeromq code to understand what
>> > failed,
>> > the asserts aren't always clear enough. If you are going to fail fast
>> > print
>> > a usable error message!
>> >
>> > I would really like this project to succeed, but I know many people will
>> > look at the fail fast stuff and rule zeromq out as a solution (half the
>> > developers where I work are having that reaction). This is doubly true
>> > in
>> > larger organizations for which I've worked for. Nobody will rule out a
>> > project for using error codes and not failing fast, because if they did
>> > there wouldn't be very many libraries they could use :)
>> > </2c>
>> >
>> > Robin
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > zeromq-dev mailing list
>> > zeromq-dev at lists.zeromq.org
>> > http://lists.zeromq.org/mailman/listinfo/zeromq-dev
>> >
>> >
>
>

- Martin