[photojosh]

I've just finished my first project using websockets. Coming from the embedded world and bare UARTs plus a little bit of C sockets, I found it hilarious that we've got so many layers to essentially do the same thing that I could do on an 8-bit microcontroller.

The critical difference? Speed of development. Websockets was so blindingly quick to get working. Haven't hit the edge cases yet though. If I were doing it with raw sockets I'd have to reimplement many of those layers and write a mobile app as opposed to a mobile webpage with only 300 lines of JS.

> Ever used HTTP for peer-to-peer communication? Sort of. They're peers, but one always acts as the server, I just haven't needed to make them true peers, but I could if I needed to. One of the nodes connects to a public server and has other private nodes connect to it. (300 lines of Python/Twisted)

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> The critical difference? Speed of development. Websockets was so blindingly quick to get working.

Now, is that websockets or is that "not C"?

I mean, speed of development certainly is valuable, but I would think that same speed of development only needs little more than an 8 bit µC (or, for that matter, is even possible on an 8 bit µC if the memory size is at the upper end of the range).

> Sort of. They're peers, but one always acts as the server, I just haven't needed to make them true peers, but I could if I needed to.

But that's the thing: You could if you needed to. Instead of it just being the natural thing to do. Though I guess NAT also is part of the problem here, which is another of those idiocies of the "modern internet".

[photojosh]

> Now, is that websockets or is that "not C"? > Though I guess NAT also is part of the problem here, which is another of those idiocies of the "modern internet".

The second point answers the first. It is websockets rather than C, because the client is a random user on a mobile web browser.

Now if I could control the other endpoint and were it not for those modern idiocies, P2P could easily be done in C. The problem then becomes discoverability (if you're after true distributed P2P) rather than the actual communications.

(I did port the lightweight lwIP TCP/IP stack to a 16-bit microcontroller and custom RTOS many years ago...)

[milesrout]

It's not exactly super hard and complicated to get things working on a microcontroller though. In fact, the first time I did it, I felt it was so much simpler than all this complicated web stuff.

[photojosh]

It absolutely is! I love micro-controller development. It's you and the bare metal, not dozens of layers of abstraction that often feel like they're fighting you at every turn.

On the other hand, it's hard to impress with blinkenlights and basic motor driving.

I'm currently going through a phase of thinking on how I could apply functional programming theory and techniques to the next iteration of this embedded system...