[zeromq-dev] cppzmq revival and RFC on design goals and supported platforms

[Simon.Giesecke at btc-ag.com]

Hi,

Pawel Kurdybacha (kurdybacha) and me (sigiesec) have recently started to "revive" cppzmq (https://github.com/zeromq/cppzmq), the light-weight C++ wrapper around libzmq. We added CI for Windows/MSVC, Linux and MacOS, implemented tests, cleaned up the CMake infrastructure, formatted the source code consistently and added some overview documentation.

If you are using cppzmq or are interested in using it, we encourage you to have a look at the recent changes.

One particular point we would like to seek feedback on are the design goals, which have recently been documented for the first time. I tried to extrapolate them from the actual design, and from the reasons we chose to use cppzmq in comparison to other alternatives. These are part of the https://github.com/zeromq/cppzmq/blob/master/README.md file:

* cppzmq maps the libzmq C API to C++ concepts. In particular:
   * it is type-safe (the libzmq C API exposes various class-like concepts as void*)
   * it provides exception-based error handling (the libzmq C API provides errno-based error handling)
   * it provides RAII-style classes that automate resource management (the libzmq C API requires the user to take care to free resources explicitly)
* cppzmq is a light-weight, header-only binding. You only need to include the header file zmq.hpp (and maybe zmq_addon.hpp) to use it.
* zmq.hpp is meant to contain direct mappings of the abstractions provided by the libzmq C API, while zmq_addon.hpp provides additional higher-level abstractions.

We would like to here from you if you agree with these design goals. If you have any opposing views, proposals for improvement or extension of the design goals, please share them on the mailing list or by sending a PR.

Another part of the README is a section on the supported platforms. Please review this section, in particular if you do not use MacOS, Linux or Windows/MSVC with a recent compiler. If you successfully use a different platform, please send a PR to include this in the list of "Additional platforms that are known to work". Support for non-C++11 compilers is already partial only, and might be removed completely, unless there are users that still require such support.

Of course, you are also invited to contribute extensions, new features, cleanup, further tests, etc. to cppzmq.

Best regards
Simon

--
i.A. Simon Giesecke
BTC Business Technology Consulting AG
Kurfürstendamm 33
10719 Berlin
E-Mail: Simon.Giesecke at btc-ag.com

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