[zeromq-dev] Language binding guidelines

[gonzalo diethelm]

> There have been a discussion about providing a set of standard
> guidelines that all language bindings should follow. The obvious idea is
> to maintain at least some consistency between 0MQ APIs for different
> languages.
> 
> I've started with the document, however, it would benefit from your
> comments and observations:
> 
> http://www.zeromq.org/guidelines:bindings


A few comments. Sorry for not sending a patch; I am in Chile, where we were recently hit by a major earthquake, so my access to the repo is flaky at best.

Change "binging" to ""binding" in this paragraph:
"As these constants are the main extensibility mechanism for ØMQ, developer of the binging should make it as easy as possible to add new constants to the set."

On OO languages, I think Brian's idea about putting everything inside the global ZMQ class makes sense. If we carry this idea to the extreme, it would mean that the Context object might very well be invisible to the user:

class ZMQ {
  private Context context;

  public ZMQ() {...}

  public Socket makeSocket(...) { /* use context here */ }
}

You might have several of these ZMQ objects initialized at the same time (each hiding a Context object). The nice thing about this approach is that the user only deals with Socket objects (through the ZMQ class).

Question: Java does not have proper destructors; there are no assurances as to when an object that is not used anymore will be chosen for destruction. This means there is no way to explicitly invoke the corresponding calls to zmq_term() (for Context) and zmq_close() (for Socket). If this might be a problem, perhaps we should expose these calls through an explicit destroy() / close() method in the binding. What do you think? What is the case in other languages? This is sort of covered in the proposed policy, but it is not explicitly mentioned in the context of languages lacking destructors.

-- 
Gonzalo Diethelm

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