It must be emphasised that, despite the name, ZeroMQ is not a message queue. It is a networking library. The current blurb says:

> ZeroMQ (also known as ØMQ, 0MQ, or zmq) looks like an embeddable networking library but acts like a concurrency framework.

And the old meme was "ZeroMQ is a replacement for Berkeley sockets".

It's a pretty cool networking library. But it makes no sense to think of it in the same slot as RabbitMQ, or even Redis.

That the GP mentioned it does make me wonder if they don't really understand what they're doing.

EDIT I love that the official guide actually has this diagram in! Pieter Hintjens's death was a sad loss. http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all#How-It-Began

As an aside, the ZeroMQ Guide is the finest piece of technical writing I have ever seen - closely followed by Pieter’s (sadly unfinished) “Scalable C” book. His non-technical writing is also excellent.

I had a fun time implementing the Paranoid Pirate pattern with my coworker a few years back. He wrote the server part in Python, I wrote the client in PHP. We essentially built it as a wrapper to run some C code our boss wrote that we didn't want to write a PHP extension for - we used Python as a broker to allow for some concurrency. Worked super well.

a Redis list (what he's using) would handle this easily (I think Redis' PubSub also handles this)