el-cheapo heartbeat handling? about rabbitmq-c

[alanxz]

My initial reaction is: I'm not excited about putting a half-baked support for something like this. My worry is users will read "Partial Support for AMQP Heartbeats" and read it as "Supports AMQP Heartbeats", then I'm inundated with people asking why heartbeats don't work for them.

That said, I'm seeing more and more desire for such a feature in the library. So in the narrow use case where all you're doing is sitting waiting for a message to be delivered to a consumer, I see how this could be immensely useful, especially if someone is waiting potentially a long time.

My thoughts on design is that I wouldn't put it in amqp_simple_wait_frame() at least not initially. I would add a new function amqp_basic_consume_message which would have one purpose: which is to block waiting on a message from the broker. If it got a heartbeat frame, it would respond to the broker appropriately and continue waiting. My reasons behind this are several:

• The library needs a "consume a message" interface
• Given this is only partial support, I want those who want to roll their own handling of heartbeating to do so using amqp_simple_wait_frame()
• I want to be explicit as to when heartbeats are supported in the library.

So I say please go ahead and hack away. Submit a pull-request when you think you have something that could be included in the library.

[alanxz]

This has been added in #109