Go Bindings for 0mq (zeromq)

This package implements Go bindings for the 0mq C API.

Note that this is not the same as this implementation.

Installing

Install gozmq with the following commands. This requires a couple of extra steps because it uses Go's C interface which goinstall does not handle yet. Ignore the message goinstall: C: open ...: no such file or directory

goinstall github.com/alecthomas/gozmq
pushd $GOROOT/src/pkg/github.com/alecthomas/gozmq
make install
popd

Differences from the C API

The API implemented by this package does not attempt to expose zmq_msg_t at all. Instead, Recv() and Send() both operate on byte slices, allocating and freeing the memory automatically. Currently this requires copying to/from C malloced memory, but a future implementation may be able to avoid this to a certain extent.

All major features are supported: contexts, sockets, devices, and polls.

Example

Here are direct translations of some of the examples from this blog post.

A simple echo server:

package main

import zmq "github.com/alecthomas/gozmq"

func main() {
  context, _ := zmq.NewContext()
  socket, _ := context.NewSocket(zmq.REP)
  socket.Bind("tcp://127.0.0.1:5000")
  socket.Bind("tcp://127.0.0.1:6000")

  for {
    msg, _ := socket.Recv(0)
    println("Got", string(msg))
    socket.Send(msg, 0)
  }
}

A simple client for the above server:

package main

import "fmt"
import zmq "github.com/alecthomas/gozmq"

func main() {
  context, _ := zmq.NewContext()
  socket, _ := context.NewSocket(zmq.REQ)
  socket.Connect("tcp://127.0.0.1:5000")
  socket.Connect("tcp://127.0.0.1:6000")

  for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
    msg := fmt.Sprintf("msg %d", i)
    socket.Send([]byte(msg), 0)
    println("Sending", msg)
    socket.Recv(0)
  }
}

Caveats

Thread safety

The 0mq API warns:

Each ØMQ socket belonging to a particular context may only be used by the thread that created it using zmq_socket().

This is a bit of an onerous restriction.

The only way to guarantee this in Go, as far as I can tell, is to start a goroutine, call runtime.LockOSThread(), create a socket then call all socket methods in this single goroutine. For the gozmq API to abstract this would require proxying all method calls into this goroutine via channels, vastly complicating the implementation.

For now I would suggest creation and all subsequent access to each socket be performed inside a single goroutine pinned with runtime.LockOSThread():

context := zmq.NewContext()
go func () {
  runtime.LockOSThread()
  defer runtime.UnlockOSThread()

  socket := context.NewSocket(zmq.REQ)
  defer socket.Close()
  ... do stuff with socket
}()

Memory management

It's not entirely clear from the 0mq documentation how memory for zmq_msg_t and packet data is managed once 0mq takes ownership. After digging into the source a little, this package operates under the following (educated) assumptions:

References to zmq_msg_t structures are not held by the C API beyond the duration of any function call.
Packet data is reference counted internally by the C API. The count is incremented when a packet is queued for delivery to a destination (the inference being that for delivery to N destinations, the reference count will be incremented N times) and decremented once the packet has either been delivered or errored.

Zert / gozmq