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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

I've used zeromq, nanomsg, and nng. The differences are subtle and focused on native library support, background threading model, and other systems level things.

All of them are based on specs that are widely published. I've had zero problems implementing real robotic systems in nng, zmq, etc.

And it is so damn easy to use it's amazing to me the whole world doesn't use it.

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> it's amazing to me the whole world doesn't use it.

I Googled nng and apparently it's this? [1]

It's written in C so if you click the issues tab the second and third issues are "IPC - Use After Free" and "Setting TLS config option via nng_socket_set_ptr causes access violation if you free config."

Why would you want the world to build other software on this?

[1] https://github.com/nanomsg/nng

Well good to know, but I've never used TLS, since the apps were P2P over a secure overlay, so encrypting payloads was sufficient.

I've had some bad experiences with zeromq in robotic systems contexts: it's very assert-happy, and therefore tends to bring down the whole process in corner cases, and it's quite difficult to debug. It caused me quite a lot of headache and I'm no longer particularly enamored of the approach (the internal architecture is one which makes error propagation very difficult, so even if the individual bugs were fixed there's not a good overall handling strategy).

> And it is so damn easy to use it's amazing to me the whole world doesn't use it.

Perhaps many of them are locked into “the cloud” and “serverless”, by default choosing the proprietary solutions offered by these providers on their platforms?

I'm pretty sure the world doesn't use it more because it doesn't have a flashy marketing campaign and trendy developer tools/libraries don't have a plugin for it. If a whole bunch of developers aren't writing blog posts about it, does it even exist? Plus, it's old, so it's bad.

zmq was pretty dang trendy for a while. It had a well styled website and very wide language support. I think it just failed to deliver on its promise for most users.

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