[dochtman]

I started using ZeroMQ at work a few weeks ago after reading the guide.

The part that I like about ZeroMQ is that it's a simplifying abstraction, e.g. it's a fairly simple wrapper about sockets that makes life easier for me. I guess it's mostly like a library of patterns for socket usage, so it makes a request-response loop and pub-sub scenarios really easy to implement. The other thing that's great is that it's pretty much programming language agnostic, meaning that C++ code and Python code look fairly similar and can trivially be used together.

As for the transparent queueing, there are simple options to control the size of the queue; it's even possible to spool the queue to disk as soon as the memory limit is reached (see setsockopt docs and look for HWM, for high water mark).

[haberman]

All of your reasons make sense to me, it's just that all the advocacy docs set ZMQ up to be this game-changing system. I can totally buy "a fairly simple wrapper about sockets that makes life easier for me." "world-saving superheros of the networking world" not so much.

[dochtman]

I don't know, the simple building blocks it provides can be combined in a bunch of ways that are really pretty cool. I think apenwarr would might call it a "simplifying assumption". It's hardly ever the complex things that are game-changing, right?