ZeroMQ sockets in FSharp

Using ZeroMQ socket in asynchronous computations in FSharp can be a daunting task. The reason behind that is that ZeroMQ sockets are explicitly not thread-safe. This is apparently about to change:

@krstngbbrt there's a new generation of socket types (client, server, radio, dish, scatter, gather) that are threadsafe.

— Pieter Hintjens (@hintjens) July 26, 2016

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Until these new, thread-safe socket types land in a proper release and get integrated into the .NET ZeroMQ package I need a solution to allow me to pass around and use sockets on different threads while still guaranteeing that all sockets get closed an disposed of properly.

The demo I cooked up in this repository makes heavy use of AutoResetEvent signaling and a single locking step to synchronize yet another background thread which in turn owns the ZeroMQ socket.

Take a look at the source to see how its done.

Usage

Build the thing using Fake like this:

./build.sh # or .\build.cmd on windows

Then start the program in your console and type-in how many random numbers you want to compute the square of. Thats it.