No, Nanomsg is NOT dead
There seems to have been some pretty misleading data out on the Internet, indicating that "nanomsg is dead". The main culprit here is a "postmortem" by Drew Crawford. Unfortunately comments are apparently not working on that post according to Drew himself.
The thing is this (apologies to Samuel Clemens): "reports of the death of nanomsg have been greatly exaggerated".
So it's time to set the record straight.
I've been working hard on nanomsg, and the Scalability Protocols that are intrinsic to nanomsg for quite some time. It has been generally occupied my full time paid job for approximately the past year. I've been working on this stuff part time for longer than that.
The main focus during this time has been a complete rewrite of the core library, known as NNG. NNG, or nanomsg-next-gen, aims to be a far superior version of nanomsg, with significant new capabilities, greatly improved reliability, scalability, extensibility, and maintainability. It is wire compatible with legacy nanomsg and mangos, and retains a backwards compatible API (though it also offers a newer API which should be quite a lot easier to use).
During all this time, I've continued to act as the maintainer for nanomsg, although at this point I'd say that nanomsg itself is in sustaining mode, as I'm very focused on having NNG stand in as a full replacement for nanomsg.
We've also published the first NNG book, which is really just the reference manual. There are over 400 pages (actually about 650 in the 7.5"x9.25" printed edition, which I've not put up yet) of detailed API documentation available. (Let me know if you're interested in the print edition -- it costs me about $35 to produce, but I'm willing to make it available for folks that are willing to pay for it. Admittedly the electronic version is probably a lot more useful since it has working hyperlinks and supports searching.) Oh, and by the way, the book also covers the legacy API used with legacy libnanomsg.
I'm working on the second NNG book, which will be much more of a "how-to" (backed up with case studies and code) now. (This will take some time to come to market. At the moment these books are a secondary effort, since the time spent on them is time spent away from working on the code itself or on related commercial activities.)
There have been more contributors to NNG of late, and interest is picking up as NNG itself is already on final countdown for its FCS approach. (The first beta release, 1.0.0-beta.1 was released last week. I expect to release a 2nd beta today, and then the final release will probably come a week or so later, depending upon beta test results of course.)
The work I've done for NNG has also inspired me to make further improvements to mangos. Over the course of the next few months you can expect to see further harmonization between these two projects as NNG gains support for the STAR protocol from mangos, and mangos gains some new capabilities (such as optional separable contexts to enable much easier development of concurrent applications.)
So, if you've heard that "nanomsg is dead", now you know better. In fact, I'd venture to say that the project is healthier and more alive than it ever was.
Furthermore, in many respects the new NNG project is far more robust, scalable, and stable than I believe nanomsg or ZeroMQ have ever been. (This because NNG has been designed with a serious eye towards production readiness from the first line of code. Every error case is carefully considered.)
If you haven't looked at any this stuff lately, give it another look!
The thing is this (apologies to Samuel Clemens): "reports of the death of nanomsg have been greatly exaggerated".
So it's time to set the record straight.
I've been working hard on nanomsg, and the Scalability Protocols that are intrinsic to nanomsg for quite some time. It has been generally occupied my full time paid job for approximately the past year. I've been working on this stuff part time for longer than that.
The main focus during this time has been a complete rewrite of the core library, known as NNG. NNG, or nanomsg-next-gen, aims to be a far superior version of nanomsg, with significant new capabilities, greatly improved reliability, scalability, extensibility, and maintainability. It is wire compatible with legacy nanomsg and mangos, and retains a backwards compatible API (though it also offers a newer API which should be quite a lot easier to use).
During all this time, I've continued to act as the maintainer for nanomsg, although at this point I'd say that nanomsg itself is in sustaining mode, as I'm very focused on having NNG stand in as a full replacement for nanomsg.
We've also published the first NNG book, which is really just the reference manual. There are over 400 pages (actually about 650 in the 7.5"x9.25" printed edition, which I've not put up yet) of detailed API documentation available. (Let me know if you're interested in the print edition -- it costs me about $35 to produce, but I'm willing to make it available for folks that are willing to pay for it. Admittedly the electronic version is probably a lot more useful since it has working hyperlinks and supports searching.) Oh, and by the way, the book also covers the legacy API used with legacy libnanomsg.
I'm working on the second NNG book, which will be much more of a "how-to" (backed up with case studies and code) now. (This will take some time to come to market. At the moment these books are a secondary effort, since the time spent on them is time spent away from working on the code itself or on related commercial activities.)
There have been more contributors to NNG of late, and interest is picking up as NNG itself is already on final countdown for its FCS approach. (The first beta release, 1.0.0-beta.1 was released last week. I expect to release a 2nd beta today, and then the final release will probably come a week or so later, depending upon beta test results of course.)
The work I've done for NNG has also inspired me to make further improvements to mangos. Over the course of the next few months you can expect to see further harmonization between these two projects as NNG gains support for the STAR protocol from mangos, and mangos gains some new capabilities (such as optional separable contexts to enable much easier development of concurrent applications.)
So, if you've heard that "nanomsg is dead", now you know better. In fact, I'd venture to say that the project is healthier and more alive than it ever was.
Furthermore, in many respects the new NNG project is far more robust, scalable, and stable than I believe nanomsg or ZeroMQ have ever been. (This because NNG has been designed with a serious eye towards production readiness from the first line of code. Every error case is carefully considered.)
If you haven't looked at any this stuff lately, give it another look!
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