[wallstprog]

Well, the original non-thread-safe sockets (e.g., ZMQ_SUB, etc.) were that way because they support multi-part messages. And yes, the fact that they are not thread-safe is a bit of a stumbling-block for ZeroMQ newbies (including me, back in the day).

However, it's not that hard to work around their non-thread-safe nature with a single dispatch thread (e.g., see <https://github.com/nyfix/OZ/blob/master/src/transport.c#L457>), and that approach has other potential benefits.

In any case, newer socket types (e.g., ZMQ_CLIENT) have since been defined that are thread-safe, but necessarily don't support multi-part messages. (They tend to be different in other ways as well -- e.g., ZMQ_RADIO/ZMQ_DISH are "sort of" replacements for the original ZMQ_PUB/ZMQ_SUB sockets, but have other constraints as well).