[zeromq-dev] new libzmq API

[Martin Sustrik]

On 18/01/13 09:10, Pieter Hintjens wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 2:00 AM, KIU Shueng Chuan<nixchuan at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> I think there was some effort from 2.2 to 3.2 to give ZMQ a more similar
>> interface to regular sockets?
>> e.g. Changing the send function to return the number bytes sent on success
>> instead of 0.
>
> This was Martin Sustrik's vision of 0MQ: "Instead of inventing new
> APIs and complex wire protocols, 0MQ extends the socket API,
> eliminating the learning curve and allowing a network programmer to
> master it in a couple of hours. The wire protocols are simplistic,
> even trivial." [http://lwn.net/Articles/369885/]
>
> I don't know what other people think but my own experience is that
> this view of 0MQ wasn't very helpful except as an early selling point;
> we suffered due to the lack of a properly designed protocol, and the
> "POSIX socket" API has been clumsy to use and extend.

My goal was to allow at some point to substitute the user-space 
implementation (ZeroMQ) by kernel-space implementation without breaking 
applications too badly. Given that ZeroMQ is now evolving towards being 
a simple user-space async I/O library, similar to say Boost.Asio, rather 
than towards being part of the networking stack, using a non-standard 
API is perfectly OK.

Martin