ZeroMQ VS NATS

Slightly OT:

Are ZeroMQ and NanoMQ still widely used (and recommended)?

https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq

https://github.com/nanomq/nanomq

Remarkable, up until recently, requests for a new release were sumewhat brusquely rejected and marked as spam.

https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq/issues/4455

I wonder what made the maintainer change his mind.

FP Libraries: gRPC, ZeroMQ, and AREG are examples of libraries with a special focus on providing possibilities for Interprocess Communication. Developed using C++, they facilitate communication through predefined APIs, emphasizing functional programming concepts.

Unlikely, but they seem to be different things altogether. BlazingMQ appears to be a traditional message queue (think ActiveMQ), with message peristence. ZeroMQ is more of a network middleware (think Tibco Rendezvous), and does not include persistence.

BlazingMQ also appears to be more of a "platform" or "service" that an app can use (sort of like Oracle, say) -- ZeroMQ includes libraries that one can use to build an app, service or platform, but none is provided "out of the box".

Which makes it harder to get started with ZeroMQ, since by definition every ZeroMQ app is essentially built "from scratch".

If you're interested in ZeroMQ, you may want to check out OZ (https://github.com/nyfix/OZ), which is a Rendezvous-like platform that uses the OpenMAMA API (https://github.com/finos/OpenMAMA) and ZeroMQ (https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq) transport to provide a full-featured network middleware implementation. OZ has been used in our shop since 2020 handling approx 50MM high-value messages per day on our global FIX network.

-- Using src='https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq/releases/download/v4.3.4/zeromq-4.3.4.tar.gz'

Just check copying file in source repo https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq

I think the situation is more subtle than the poster admits.

No, ZeroMQ and successors do not tell you about socket state. You can't detect disconnection or reconnection. But then if a TCP connection fails in some way that does not lead to disconnection (packets getting dropped, remote machine powers down), it can't possibly tell you about that either, but you still need to deal with it. So in any case, you need some sort of application-level error detection and recovery; you need heartbeats, and serial numbers in messages, and a protocol for explicitly restarting a connection and performing the initial handshake. And once you have that, explicit connection events from ZeroMQ are much less important.

Admittedly, given that this is a TCP transport, reporting reconnections would still be useful, because TCP won't ever drop messages from the interior of a sequence itself (if it delivers 15, it has delivered 1 - 14 already), so you shouldn't need the serial numbers.

And if it's really not possible to detect authentication failures, than that seems rubbish. And it seems that is indeed the case: https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq/issues/3505

From https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq

Several message brokers, such as NATS and database queues, are not supported by OpenTelemetry (OTel) SDKs. This article will guide you on how to use context propagation explicitly with these message queues.

https://nats.io/ (Tracker removed)

> Connective Technology for Adaptive Edge & Distributed Systems

> An Introduction to NATS - The first screencast

I guess I don't need to know what it is

During our interview, we referred to NATS quite a few times! If you want to learn more about it, Sebastian suggests this tutorial series.

Pueue dumps the state of the queue to the disk as JSON every time the state changes, so when you have a lot of queued jobs this results in considerable disk io. I actually changed it to compress the state file via zstd which helped quite a bit but then eventually just moved on to running NATS [1] locally.

[1] https://nats.io/

Imagine you have an AI-powered personal alerting chat assistant that interacts using up-to-date data. Whether it's a big move in the stock market that affects your investments, any significant change on your shared SharePoint documents, or discounts on Amazon you were waiting for, the application is designed to keep you informed and alert you about any significant changes based on the criteria you set in advance using your natural language. In this post, we will learn how to build a full-stack event-driven weather alert chat application in Python using pretty cool tools: Streamlit, NATS, and OpenAI. The app can collect real-time weather information, understand your criteria for alerts using AI, and deliver these alerts to the user interface.

Why wasn't NATS[1] used ?

Written in Go, single-binary deployment... there's a lot to love about NATS !

[1]https://nats.io/

require nats.io

About cost, see [1]. Also, S3 prices have been increasing and there's been a bunch of alternative offers for object store from other companies. I think people in here (HN) comment often about increasing costs of AWS offerings.

Distributed systems and consensus are inherently hard problem, but there are a lot of implementations that you can study (like Etcd that you mention, or NATS [2], which I've been playing with and looks super cool so far :-p) if you want to understand the internals, on top of many books and papers released.

Again, I never said it was "easy" to build distributed systems, I just don't think there's any esoteric knowledge to what S3 provides.

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1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

2: https://nats.io/

I am in a project were nats.io is used. Someone thought, it would be a great idea to link data in an event with data in a response using the response channel name.