Simon Willison’s Weblog

ZeroMQ: Modern and Fast Networking Stack. I get ZeroMQ now. I was having trouble figuring out how it differed from things like RabbitMQ—it turns out it’s an entirely new low-level socket abstraction, designed to make common socket programming tasks like message sending/receiving and publish/subscribe a whole lot easier than dealing with raw BSD sockets.

# 5th September 2010, 7:41 pm / io, messaging, networking, sockets, zeromq, recovered

Understanding node.js. A king providing orders to his army of servants is a much better analogy than my hyperactive squid.

# 18th May 2010, 6:44 pm / async, eventio, io, javascript, node, recovered

Reexamining Python 3 Text I/O. Python 3.1’s IO performance is a huge improvement over 3.0, but still considerably slower than 2.6. It turns out it’s all to do with Python 3’s unicode support: When you read a file in to a string, you’re asking Python to decode the bytes in to UTF-8 (the new default encoding) at the same time. If you open the file in binary mode Python 3 will read raw bytes in to a bytestring instead, avoiding the conversion overhead and performing only 4% slower than the equivalent code in Python 2.6.4.

# 28th January 2010, 1:28 pm / python, python3, io, text, unicode, performance, david-beazley

node.js. “Evented I/O for V8 JavaScript”—a JavaScript environment built on top of the super-fast V8 engine which provides event-based IO functionality for building highly concurrent TCP and HTTP servers. The API design is superb—everything is achieved using JavaScript events and callbacks (even regular file IO) and the small standard library ships with comprehensive support for HTTP and DNS. Overall it’s very similar to Twisted and friends, but JavaScript’s anonymous function syntax feels more natural than the Python equivalent. It compiles cleanly on Snow Leopard. Definitely a project to watch.

# 9th November 2009, 11:25 pm / node, javascript, io, v8, eventbasedio, twisted, http, dns

Offline Processing on App Engine: a Look Ahead. A session at IO next week: “App Engine was designed to run request-driven web applications, although this will change in the coming year with the release of a number of offline computing components. In this session, we’ll explore the task queue/executor model of computation and some of the more interesting applications.”

# 20th May 2009, 12:40 pm / appengine, io, google, message-queues, offlineprocessing, workers

Eventlet—Second Life Wiki. Seriously powerful non-blocking IO library for Python, currently maintained by Linden Lab as part of the server architecture used for Second Life.

# 26th November 2007, 3:21 pm / eventlet, python, lindenlab, secondlife, io

skipdb (via) Small, fast BerkeleyDB style database using skip lists, by the creator of the Io programming language.

# 4th February 2007, 1:09 pm / skiplists, skipdb, berkeleydb, io, steve-dekorte