ZeroMQ's variety of socket semantics is great, and it does a good job abstracting away the messy details of TCP. You can build rather complicated systems on top of it much easier and faster than you could using raw sockets. The implementation itself has some rough spots, such as the multi threading. I really like the elegance of nanomsg, but it never really got the same polish that ZeroMQ did. I wouldn't expect the same raw throughput as a hand-tuned TCP based protocol, but it's generally more than fast enough for most use cases.
I believe the original developer passed away a few years ago?
And he was passing away due to cancer came to HN for one of his last discussions. He also mentioned he was broke and a PayPal account for donations for his family was mentioned.
nkurz on Apr 18, 2016 [–]
Thanks. Does anything come to mind that you should have done more of (or instead)?
PieterH on Apr 18, 2016 [–]
Probably more frequent checkups, to be honest. Though it's probably moot. "
Pieter Hintjens, whom you are referring to, was actually not so much involved in the development of the core ZeroMQ library, though he certainly contributed. His main role was building a community and he did develop a high level C binding czmq.
Martin Sustrik was actually what could be referred to as the lead engineer for the initial ZeroMQ project, though he left it quite some time ago.
I believe the original developer passed away a few years ago?