[TickleSteve]

I would suggest you don't make dramatic claims for a subject that has decades of theory behind it with a huge amount of nuance depending on the exact workload and characteristics of the machines in question.

Don't get me wrong, message-passing has some advantages, but they certainly aren't that it 'solves' parallelism. If you wish to know more, investigate:

- Smalltalk and Erlang (for message passing languages).

- QNX (for a message-passing OS)

- mpiPY (for a message-passing Python library, mpi is the grandfather of message passing libraries that runs everywhere).

- Occam & the transputer for an example of a hardware-mp implementation (actually its Communicating Sequential Processes, but for your purposes it would be enlightening).

- golang for a modern-day implementation of CSP.

- Python implementation of CSP (https://github.com/futurecore/python-csp)

- Discussion about MP (http://wiki.c2.com/?MessagePassingConcurrency, for more just google it)

Basically, its great that you want to learn about concurrency & parallelism, but you've come to a gun fight with a blunt butter knife.

[bushin]

HN comment section shouldn't be a gun fight.

[jstarfish]

It isn't, it was more a metaphor for the fact that he's making arguments way out of his league of understanding.

[devxpy]

> I would suggest you don't make dramatic claims

If you could point out some stuff from ZProc's page, that would be nice!

> mpi is the grandfather of message passing libraries

Never heard of it before, but just a simple google search reveals that it _might_ be more performant than zmq, but not as fault-tolerant and flexible. It really looks like a niche thing, from this comment by peter hintjens

> Why smart cloud builders are betting everything on 0MQ. In detail, compare to the alternatives. Hand-rolling your own TCP stack is insane. Using any broker-based product won't scale. Buying licenses from IBM or TIBCO would eat up your capital. Supercomputing products like MPI aren't designed for this scale. There is literally no alternative.

(http://zeromq.org/docs:the-ten-minute-talk)

> Don't get me wrong, message-passing has some advantages, but they certainly aren't that it 'solves' parallelism.

Doesn't it? (For most people)

---

I can't believe I'm hearing words against zmq on HN, its wierd.

Even the guys over at Dask settled on ZMQ over anything - https://github.com/dask/distributed/issues/776

P.S. Seems like you know quite a lot about this topic. Do you have any projects of your own that I can see?

Bottom line, I think most people would be happy doing message passing parallelism in the real world. Sure, it doesn't look that good in theory but works damn good in practicality.

[TickleSteve]

Nothing against zeromq, its good s/w, but like all tools it must be used appropriately.

...also, nanomsg is the 'improved' successor.

Also, MPI isn't a 'niche' thing, its the way that a large proportion of high-performance applications have been implemented for a few decades (think Crays & weather prediction). Zeromq has a few simple web-apps using it (I exagerate slightly).

[devxpy]

Seems like you know quite a lot about this topic. Do you have any projects of your own that I can see?

Or do you only work for your employer or something?

[adw]

MPI is extremely well-known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_Passing_Interface

Anyone who has done any scientific or technical computing is highly likely to be familiar with it – it's been around in some form for over 25 years.

[devxpy]

Do you think using this over zmq in my thingy would really bring much improvement?

I use it everyday for some of my home baked apps, and would love if this really made a difference.

[adw]

That depends on your workload. 0MQ is fine software, but they solve different problems.

The problem here is the claims you're making. You've written some utility classes around 0MQ for some applications, which is a real thing, so I'd rewrite your GitHub readme to just demonstrate what problems you've solved with it (and at what kind of scale). Making big, sweeping claims gets you into these kinds of threads, because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence :-)

[TickleSteve]

Like the vast majority of software engineers, my work is not open source.

But since you seem like arguments from authority, I've got around 25 years experience in software ranging from hard-real-time embedded defence software to safety-critical train braking systems. I've been software architect on systems selling 10's of millions of products, currently working in the IoT space. I've architected and implemented software on servers, desktops, embedded and mobile platforms.

But no, you aren't likely to find my stuff on GitHub.

[devxpy]

Alright, thanks.

It's the internet, so have to make sure.

Most of my stuff is closed source as well.

Iot you say?

I made a couple of stuff myself, mostly using the micropython stack or the raspberry pi.

What do you generally work on?

[TickleSteve]

Not MicroPython.

If you're interested in IoT (or embedded s/w in general), get away from MicroPython.

The primary characteristic of most embedded products is to be low-cost. When you're selling millions of products, cost counts. You can't waste cycles or resources on Python.

MicroPython is a toy for the 'makers'. Similarly the JS equivalents. No real high volume product would use those technologies.

[devxpy]

Is "Crays and weather prediction" really a part of everyday compute?