Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TickleSteve 2862 days ago
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).
2 comments
devxpy 2862 days ago
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?

link
adw 2862 days ago
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.

link
devxpy 2862 days ago
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.

link
adw 2862 days ago
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 :-)

link
devxpy 2862 days ago
Updated readme to be a little better

https://github.com/pycampers/zproc

I use it in a couple of my own stuff which I have open sourced yet.

I do plan to release them, and I hope I can prove the usefulness of the library using those...

professional (corporate) stuff would be a far fetch for me, obviously.

link
TickleSteve 2862 days ago
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.

link
devxpy 2862 days ago
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?

link
TickleSteve 2862 days ago
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.

link
devxpy 2862 days ago
the esp8266 boards are like pretty cheap.

Won't argue about pyboard, because that's more of a gimmick. (Way too expensive for what it does)

I think the cost and time of developing on micropython vs a lower level language like C, would superseded the cost associated with wasted cpu cycles.

However, I agree with the fact that no real product would use mpy right now in production because of the infancy of the project.

It certainly looks promising.

It's definitely NOT a toy.

OTOH JS is just a bad choice for this kind of work IMO. ( I'm a firm believer that JS is just a bad choice for anything in general, but IOT is just madness)

link
TickleSteve 2862 days ago
No, uPython IS a toy.

In embedded s/w, the cost of the h/w outweighs everything else, ok so your 'easily developed' Python app will cost (say) 10K less to develop... but the resource requirements mean you need to go up $0.5 on the processor....

Oops, on your 500'000 devices you've suddenly wasted $250,000. All because you couldn't be bothered to save a few KB of RAM.

Python is a toy for embedded s/w.... dont get me going on catching bugs at runtime in an embedded system because you're using a dynamically typed language! Now you have to upgrade 500,000 device over-the air (cellular data costs) which will take a week, meanwhile your customers a fuming because their data is being lost!

seriously!

link
devxpy 2862 days ago
Is "Crays and weather prediction" really a part of everyday compute?
link