[zeromq-dev] Introducing Caravan: Simple, Faithful ZMQ-Bindings for Objective Caml (Pedro Borges)

[Pieter Hintjens]

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 4:24 AM, Brian Ledger <bpl29 at cornell.edu> wrote:

>> I must say I like your approach very much, however in some cases having 21
>> methods allows the user to write the code in a more declarative fashion  for
>> example "subscribe sock ..." vs "setsockopt sock subscribe ..." or "has_more
>> sock" vs "getsockopt sock rcvmore".]

We face some common questions in all language bindings. The two main
ones seem to be (a) how to improve existing bindings and (b) what
level to aim bindings at.

My own views are as follows:

* It's generally best to improve into an existing binding, unless the
authors are absent and silent, or there is a real need for a fresh
approach. Forks confuse people.
* It's profitable to map libzmq's API closely (including to keep
zero-copy functionality) but it's also profitable to build
abstractions on top.

For me it'd be interesting to document and try to share & reuse the
abstractions we build on top, e.g. wrapping setsockopt/getsockopt,
reactors, multipart message processing.

Some reasons for making higher-level abstractions:

* it lets you hide differences between versions of 0MQ
* it lets you fix misfeatures of the API, e.g. blocking in zmq_term,
treating 'more' as a socket (rather than message) property
* it lets your users write shorter and clearer code

-Pieter