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If you do the obvious work to convert UDP to a reliable streaming mechanism, you will generally more-or-less reinvent TCP, only probably more poorly, and would probably be better off just using TCP. UDP is a good choice when you have options or requirements that TCP can't accommodate. For instance, the classic case of streaming audio has both; it both requires timely delivery and has some very sophisticated techniques for dealing with missing packets with a lot of local intelligence about human perception and such built into the codecs. If you can drop packets without issue, if future packets completely supercede past packets (FPS network gaming for instance), there's a lot of possibilities, but if you're just going to recreate reliable streaming you probably be net losing on account of the effort spent doing that instead of something useful, and bugs in the implementation.



Why are so many comments here ignoring the purpose of the article?

The purpose of this is for games, not web traffic or torrent2.0.

In real time games where you're syncing physics states or player locations data >200ms isn't just useless it's actually negative.

This article is 2+ years old, and is the foundation I suspect for libyojimbo which hybridizes UDP low latency communication for large player real time games and reliable messaging (basically custom TCP?) for less time critical things.


I don't know, but that doesn't have anything to do with my comment, which is entirely technical. Perhaps you meant to put it somewhere else?




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