Does zeromq support IPC as a transport channel on windows?

Question

I get the following error message, when I try the router example wiht python on Windows (Windows 8):

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "router.py", line 43, in <module>
    client.bind("ipc://routing.ipc")
  File "socket.pyx", line 432, in zmq.core.socket.Socket.bind (zmq\core\socket.c:3870)
  File "checkrc.pxd", line 23, in zmq.core.checkrc._check_rc (zmq\core\socket.c:5712)
zmq.error.ZMQError: Protocol not supported

So I suppose that the IPC transport channel for zeromq is not suported on Windows (at least Windows 8). Is this true?

Iceland

The problem is that Windows native IPC methods do not support event notification thus cannot integrate with a reactor. – Freezedry

@Steve-o: Windows named pipes support asynchronous I/O and trigger completion notifications to I/O completion ports (IOCP). They integrate just fine with a proactor (or reactor) framework. The ZeroMQ implementation for Windows probably uses the BSD(-ish) socket API and rather than using an IOCP, which would be a better explanation as to why ZeroMQ doesn't support the IPC transport on Windows. – Saltant

ZMQ now supports IPC on Windows - see most recent answer – Bromberg

Answer 1

The question How to use Zeromq's inproc and ipc transports? mentions that IPC relies on POSIX named pipes, which Windows doesn't support.

You should be able to use TCP on a Loopback Interface instead without trouble.

Metritis

Indeed - the question becomes, why would you ever use IPC instead of TCP for anything? According to this, TCP between localhost processes is just as fast as IPC anyway! – Pirog

As a more recent answer below says, IPC is now supported for Windows. Also, this answer suggests that TCP on Windows is actually rather slow: https://mcmap.net/q/665878/-speed-of-socket-send-recv-on-windows – Bromberg

Answer 2

It is not supported on Windows, but TCP over localhost gives much the same performance as IPC, on Linux and OS/X and I'd just use that on Windows too.

Perce

Answer 3

With Win 10 now supporting AF_UNIX libzmq was updated to support IPC. It was added to the 4.3.3 release. For more information see this pull

Anstice

The current docs unfortunately do not make Windows support overly clear: libzmq.readthedocs.io/en/latest/zmq_ipc.html - currently only implemented on operating systems that provide UNIX domain sockets – Bromberg