[zeromq-dev] Notes from a hackathon

[Pieter Hintjens]

On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 9:41 PM, AJ Lewis <AJ.Lewis at quantum.com> wrote:

> This doesn't address the use of having messages that don't need to be
> decoded at each hop...

Let me collect what I see as valid requirements here, from the entire thread:

- a routing stack for multi-hop request-reply, which can be used
without decoding the message
- replacement of "identity" concept with something like "reply handle"
- a simple message blob that reduces upstream costs for message handling
- atomic send/recv methods that can potentially be made threadsafe
- scatter-gather send/recv that allows zero-copy for efficiency
- new higher-level client/server semantics that replace req-router-dealer-rep

What we do not need to do:

- move any zproto serialization into libzmq; this can happily live at
higher layers
- break or change any existing contracts, as everything works and is stable

These can all be satisfied, IMO, with some new protocol designs and
new client/server sockets, and new API classes. And we can do this
slowly, over time, perhaps with faster experimentation in stacks like
NetMQ that are more fungible.

-Pieter