[erlang-questions] Troll bait: If your code really matters, you'll write it in C++

[Matthew Sackman]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2012 at 09:44:07PM +0100, james wrote:
> I did have interest in it (from a 'bet I could write one of those' hobby 
> perspective) but the history seems unfortunate and the very significant 
> changes between the definition between 0.8, 0.9 and 1.0 don't bode well 
> IMO.

0.8 and 0.9 are similar. 0.10 is rather different. 0.9.1 is the most
widely used version and is a tidy-up of 0.9. 1.0 is a *completely new
protocol* and ideally should not have used the "AMQP" label at all. It
is utterly different and, for example, does not define any sort of
broker semantics.

> Maybe its a sleeper - its certainly nice to see something 
> specified with a wire format rather than a borken API in a language you 
> don't want to use (for everything). iMatix throwing their toys around 
> and doing zeromq didn't help, though they seem to be having 'issues' 
> with process on that too.

I'd say 0mq is excellent at solving a different problem to AMQP. These
things can very happily coexist and even cooperate. They do address
slightly different problems though.

> Maybe it will gain some traction once there are multiple 1.0 broker and 
> client implementations and a compatibility festival can be had the same 
> way the IIOP CORBA compatibility was demonstrated.

Yes, well that would require multiple people to understand the 1.0 spec.
0.9.1 and 0.8 benefitted from a relatively small spec that people in the
community as a whole could fairly easily implement - it was feasible in
a weekend to sit down and write a client in your pet language and have
it be able to talk to, eg, RabbitMQ. Thus the vast majority of clients
you'll find in the wild, not written by companies, are for 0.8 or 0.9.1.

1.0 is a massive spec and I'm yet to see any evidence of community
motivation to write clients for it. That's not to say it doesn't exist,
just that I've not seen it.

> There are more Solace jobs on CWJobs than AMQP (more than zero isn't
> hard!).

Currently 4 hits for AMQP for me, but if you search for RabbitMQ, there
are currently 7. 2 hits for Qpid. Rabbit has essentially been so
successful that most people think of "oh let's use Rabbit to solve this
problem" rather than "let's use AMQP". I.e. the Rabbit brand is more
important and meaningful than the AMQP brand.

Matthew