Sending/receiving ints over ZeroMQ

I often send an integer as a socket message. It is not a problem to convert them to and fro a std::string, still it makes the resulting code a bit confusing, so I decided to add a send() overload and a new recvAsInt() function to my zmq::Socket class.

This is the new send() function:

bool send(int value, int flags =0)
{
    zmq::message_t msg(sizeof(int));
    memcpy(msg.data(), &value, sizeof(int));
    return socket_t::send(msg, flags);
}

A new specialized function to receive a message and format it as an int:

int recvAsInt(int flags =0)
{
    zmq::message_t message;
    if(!socket_t::recv(&message, flags))
        throw error_t();

    return *(static_cast<int*>(message.data()));
}

Even the mild EAGAIN error leads to an exception. Admittedly, this is not good.

Here is how to use this functions:

// ...
skRequest.send(42);

// ...
int value = skReply.recvAsInt();

We can also have a multipart message containing ints:

skRequest.send(42, ZMQ_SNDMORE);
skRequest.send(12);

//    ...

int val1 = skReply.recvAsInt(ZMQ_RCVMORE);
int val2 = skReply.recvAsInt();

There is no type check on the data, so we can write weird code like this:

// ...
skRequest.send("hello");

// ...
int value = skReply.recvAsInt();

That runs fine, but probably gives a surprising result to the user.

The zmq::Socket new version is on github.