Greetings wise brothers.

I am working on a project where I need to send a large number of short messages between a Windows system (in a VM) and a linux server. The messages will mostly be 100 bytes or so, but might be sent at up to 100/second, so I need to send them with low overhead. I don't care if they get re-ordered as I will be time stamping them anyway, but I don't want any messages to get lost.

In a previous version of the project, I was using Net::Stomp (Using the AMQP protocol), the problem was that I needed to run a fairly heavy weight broker, and some messages went missing, so I am looking for something a bit more lightweight.

I came across ZeroMQ, and found some perl bindings on CPAN. It looks to fill the light weight and no broker requirement, but it looks like installing it under windows is tricky. I found This issue on the ZeroMQ bug tracker, where users had had all sorts of trouble getting it to compile and run under Windows. It is also not available for Active State perl.

Has anyone else had any experiences of ZeroMQ under windows? Can it be made to work reliably? Is there a pure Perl implementation of ZeroMQ? The wire protocol looks simple enough.

I am currently using Active State Perl 5.12 though I would switch to using Strawberry perl if that would work better. I would prefer not to use Cygwin perl.