[camgunz]

The penalties in TCP for dropped packets are too great, and there's essentially nothing anyone can do about it. I'm editorializing a little, but to me it's always felt like TCP's main goal was "be a good Internet citizen" to the detriment of basically everything else.

In fairness that was probably a crucial component of the Internet's success, but you don't get the good w/o the bad.

But re: "this will result in bandwidth hogging", routers will just drop your packets if you oversaturate them, so that's not a worry in practice. Well, it is for developers but they use rate scaling algorithms in those cases.

[twic]

That's an interesting perspective. My personal folk mythology of TCP is that once upon a time, there were terminals connected to mainframes by serial lines, then someone wanted to connect to a mainframe from their minicomputer, so invented a remote login program, which sort of emulated a serial line over the network, then when the ARPAnet came about, someone invented TCP to do remote logins over that. Then, because TCP existed and worked well, people invented millions of other application protocols that worked on TCP's emulated serial line, and got into the habit of thinking about protocols as things which work on emulated serial lines, and so there has never been much demand for anything else.

[camgunz]

Hah yeah I can see that. I mean, don't mess w/ success right?