zeromq-experiments

Playing around with ZeroMQ concurrency framework.

Setup

It was a real headache to get these examples going, but once I did, the needed commands are very simple. I still have a lot to learn about the C ecosystem.

First, library setup.

On Ubuntu, since all libraries needed for compilation aren't available via apt-get install, so I installed everything I needed from source tarballs, retrieved via the following commands, and installed in that order:

wget http://download.zeromq.org/zeromq-4.1.1.tar.gz
wget https://download.libsodium.org/libsodium/releases/libsodium-1.0.3.tar.gz
wget http://download.zeromq.org/czmq-3.0.1.tar.gz

Each project's website explains any other updates available via apt-get install that you might need to install these requirements.

As a note to myself, I was looking for some consistency in the C project build system, and I seem to have found some: every project listed above uses some variant of the following command list to build, test, and install itself:

./configure
make && make check
make install

configure being part of the autoconf package, and the make check target being the test suite. Only Sodium had a test suite target: you should look into it to see what a C test suite looks like.

The final problem I had was getting the examples from the "zguide" ZeroMQ docs working:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/imatix/zguide.git

First, some observations:

1. There is a build script in the examples directory in the zguide that can correctly build one or more targets in the project.
2. If you look at build, it sets some vars and does some arg parsing, but then hands things off to its co-script, c, in the same directory.
3. c has a -v flag that can be used to see verbose output.

Finally, if you look at the output of the verbose run above, you see that -l directives are being issued for the two big libraries in these projects, zmq and czmq. Since hello-world only relies on zmq, I just added the -l zmq flag.

Thus the command to compile the first example in the zguide without using the shipped build system, and the one I've added to that directory's README, is the following:

gcc hello-world.c -lzmq