zlink overview¶

zlink Core is a raw messaging runtime. It provides contexts, typed raw sockets, multipart messages, pollers, generic timers, socket monitors, TLS, and network transports. Application topology and stateful-object behavior belong to the Framework packages.

Runtime layers¶

+------------------------------------------------------+
| Application and language bindings                    |
+------------------------------------------------------+
| Public C API: context, socket, message, eventing      |
+------------------------------------------------------+
| Socket patterns: PAIR, PUB/SUB, XPUB/XSUB,           |
| DEALER/ROUTER, STREAM                                 |
+------------------------------------------------------+
| Protocol engines and transports                      |
+------------------------------------------------------+
| Context, I/O threads, pipes, mailboxes, messages      |
+------------------------------------------------------+

The public API validates handles and arguments before delegating to the socket runtime. Socket implementations own pattern-specific behavior. Protocol engines encode frames, and transports perform operating-system I/O.

Socket patterns¶

Socket	Use
PAIR	One-to-one communication
PUB/SUB	Topic-based distribution
XPUB/XSUB	Subscription-aware proxying
DEALER/ROUTER	Asynchronous routed request/reply
STREAM	Raw byte-stream integration

Supported endpoint schemes depend on the build and include tcp, ipc, inproc, ws, wss, and tls.

Start here¶

Build Core and its tests:

cmake -S core -B core/build -DWITH_TLS=ON -DBUILD_TESTS=ON
cmake --build core/build

Choose a socket pattern in Socket Patterns, then use the Core API and Message API guides. The Monitoring guide covers raw socket events and snapshots.

Core API →