[zeromq-dev] Questions about Coding Style

[John D. Mitchell]

Good morning,

On Feb 11, 2012, at 01:51 , john skaller wrote:
> On 11/02/2012, at 8:27 PM, niXman wrote:
[...]
>> Continuing review of the libzmq code, I have found a few situations
>> when the program will be crushed on segmentation fault.
> 
> It's impossible to avoid this in C.

That's bollocks.

>> I consider that programs crash on segmentation fault is an
>> inadmissible error of the ØMQ developers', but not the library user's.
> 
> No. The right thing is: the library is only responsible if the
> pre-conditions of the function call are met. If the pre-conditions
> of the call are not met, all bets are off.

This is *EXACTLY* the attitude that people took who created the various libraries and the users who followed their example that has given C this particularly bad reputation.

There's certainly a realm of things way out beyond the boundaries that are beyond the reasonable control of a library like 0mq. Taking care to deal with basic, fundamental errors of parameters to functions is NOT one of them.  This is a huge, lazy, cop out and, IMHO, seriously hurts the adoption of 0mq by people/organizations who need something they can have full faith and trust in to run robustly.

This is critically important for the growth of 0mq out beyond it's traditional/historical community in the big financials. I.e. out in the wilderness where the networks aren't all high-speed and local; where there aren't operators on-call 24x7; where all of the other end-points are all basically well-behaved; where the programmers aren't living and breathing this stuff all day long; etc.

I understand your personal bias to drive people to other, "better" languages and applaud your efforts in actually creating a language. But the fact is that 0mq is a multi-language solution by design and so there's no hand waving away this very fundamental flaw.

Take care,
John