[zeromq-dev] Storm rejecting ZeroMQ

Pieter Hintjens ph at imatix.com
Mon Aug 26 22:52:44 CEST 2013


On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 10:30 PM, Charles Remes <lists at chuckremes.com> wrote:

> The 2.x to 3.x transition was very painful. The original 3.0 and 3.1 pretty
> much didn't work with anything else (and let's not forget about the original
> 4.x branch either). That all got addressed by 3.2 and its successors. It was
> a bad time for the community because Martin Sustrik and Mikko were unhappy
> with the commit policies that Pieter devised.

Mato, not Mikko :-) Mikko helped a lot with the maintenance of 3.x
until we could get stable 3.2 releases out. It was Martin "Mato"
Lucina and Martin Sustrik who released 3.1 against our agreed
policies, and tried to hijack the careful process we'd been building.

It was a difficult time but the rationale for Storm switching away
from ZeroMQ was mostly that they wanted a pure Java solution, and
didn't realize JeroMQ was there. As you said, not a single email from
Storm on the list. it's easy to claim that ZeroMQ didn't work, but
clearly it did, or Storm would not be as successful as it is.

As for "nothing working beyond 2.1.7", that is a very strange comment.
But this industry is full of strange comments...  2.1.x was so
immature and there have been so many great improvements since then.
3.2.x is even backwards interoperable with 2.1.x stable.

The thing is that without ZeroMQ, Storm would not exist, and the fact
that they are able to use Netty is a good thing. Note that there is a
Netty codec that implements ZMTP, so can interoperate with ZeroMQ
(Spotify built this).

It's far better that Storm use Netty than that they roll their own
messaging, which was NM's original plan afaict.

As to Nitro and Nano and the several other C libraries that will
appear, it's so extremely tempting to build better wheels... I think
however for most people the problem of the wheel is solved, and we're
now building drive trains and engines, and roads. ZeroMQ is much more
than libzmq.

-Pieter



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