use vs pbdzmq

[dpastoor]

@jeroenooms its cool to see some new life breathed into this package! Out of curiosity, what was the choice on reviving this vs using/contributing to https://github.com/snoweye/pbdZMQ

nothing against this package at all, just given the IRKernel and other folks have switched to pbdZMQ it would seem to make sense to focus efforts in one place?

[jeroen]

I don't use rzmq or pbdzmq myself, I just make it work on Windows/Mac. It's not always a bad thing that there are multiple packages interfacing to some C/C++ library, sometimes they cover different functionality.

That said, I think it's bad practice to bundle hacked source code for external libraries with R packages when a suitable version of the library is provided by the operating system. The rzmq package is much simpler and will be easier to maintain because it doesn't have to keep track of upstream source code.

[dpastoor]

awesome - I had a feeling as much. Thanks!

btw - any chance you'd ever consider wrapping up a http://www.grpc.io/ implementation? That would be an amazing complement for times when you want a more structured communication approach.

[armstrtw]

I think a great question is why that group didn't reach out initially on an integrated package. @snoweye has sent a few patches recently for rzmq to depend on pbdZMQ, and I appreciate the effort, but I don't think that's a good design.

@jeroenooms preempted my response, and I agree. Packaging the zmq source with the package is just bad practice. I'm happy the IRKernel team found something they could use on windows (I don't even have a windows dev box), but I think it's unnecessarily complicated.

commit a0d6d17
Author: whit armstrong.whit@gmail.com
Date: Mon Sep 26 14:25:32 2011 -0400

initial add

vs

commit afd16ca5c6777c4abf3b038848769ca23ab77367
Author: snoweye wccsnow@gmail.com
Date: Mon Aug 17 00:11:00 2015 -0400

first time go public

[dpastoor]

seems like they are going for the kitchen-sink approach vs this tightly-scoped implementation

[armstrtw]

@dpastoor or anyone else... if you want to collaborate on a grpc wrapper let me know. Will have to monitor the health of the zmq project as sadly Pieter passed away last year.

[dpastoor]

@armstrtw I'd love to - that being said, my language repertoire consists of R, javascript, go, and python.... the distinct lack of c++ makes it tough for me to directly contribute to the bindings - however I would be all over documentation, testing, and demonstrating inter-language examples

[snoweye]

• Well done! It is good to see more solutions available.
• I saw @jeroenooms static library method for windows before, but I simply can not wait and don't speak C++.
• By GPL license, the GPL binary release in general needs source code to go together. I simply don't want any legal concern, so bad practice is safer to me. I am not a lawyer, but I guess that libzmq.a may probably need a copy of source code to go with unless ZMQ does not care. @jeroenooms