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

[Gyorgy Szekely]

Hi Simon,
This is great news! We're using cppzmq in a message broker and an
accompanying communication library for 2 years now.

I fully agree with the declared goals. libzmq has a simple and concise API
with object oriented mindset. It works well on its own, but cppzmq makes it
a whole lot easier. What's particularly good about it:
- type safety and RAII: it's very straigtforward to think in classes that
properly clean-up resources at destruction
- higher level functions: multipart messages are really nice, though the
API is/was a bit inconsistent (socket.send(msg) vs, msg.send(socket))
- header only, it's very easy to use. Header only libraries usually mean
template heavy monsters, but fortunately not in this case

What I personally really like is it's a thin wrapper and doesn't want to be
more than libzmq. Methods usually map 1-to-1 to libzmq calls, there's no
hidden trickery and the documentation at api.zeromq.org is fully relevant.

I haven't checked the recent updates (yet), but I found a few strange bits
while working with cppzmq. Like the above mentioned sending inconsistency,
or having to cast the socket to void* to use it in a pollset. Apart from
that I completely agree with the direction. This is how a thin C++ wrapper
should look like for a good base C API.

BTW, we're using the lib on Ubuntu16.04 64bit / G++ 5.3, no issues so far.

Regards,
  Gyorgy

On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 6:07 PM, <Simon.Giesecke at btc-ag.com> wrote:

> 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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