Socket

The concept of a socket in ZeroMQ is completely novel. A ZeroMQ socket differs from a traditional TCP socket in the following ways (but not limited to):

• A socket sends and receives atomic messages; messages are guaranteed to either be transmitted in their entirety, or not transmitted at all.
• A socket send and receive messages asynchronously.
• A socket can transmit messages over many supported transports, including TCP.
• Incoming and outgoing messages can be queued and transmitted asynchronously by a background I/O thread.
• A socket can be connected to zero or more peers at any time.
• A socket can be bound to zero or more endpoints at any time. Each bound endpoint can listen to zero or more peers.
• Peer reconnection and disconnection is handled in the background.
• Support for many authentication and encryption strategies via Mechanism.