On Nov 22, 2013, at 9:19 AM, Paul Colomiets <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi Martin, > > On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 7:03 PM, Martin Sustrik <sustrik@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> It would be a nice weekend project to implement 0MQ-style multi-part >> messages on top of nanomsg. >> > > I wouldn't encourage anybody to do the work. For the following reasons: > > 1. Multipart messages are too attractive to use for coarse-grained > protocol. But at the end of the day they suck. > > 2. I've used to think that's multipart are nice, because even simplest > C client can make use of them without complex dependencies. But full > msgpack parser take a few hours to implement (in C), and it's nice, > well known format, that is going to be standardized by IETF > (hopefully). It's even easier to implement subset of msgpack. > > 3. That "project" would need bindings to every language. And there are > already bindings for each and every language for msgpack (or put your > favourite serialization format name here). One place where it'd be useful is where you want to use it for routing information. Cracking open a big protobuf or msgpack payload just to find out where it should be sent to is a fair bit of overhead. The extreme of that is pub/sub - you can't send packed messages over pub/sub and use subscriptions without adding some sort of basic framing (or getting *way* too chummy with the packing format in use). Cheers, Steve