[klodolph]

Complaining about the article’s title is no substitute for replying to the article’s content. Writing a provocative title is how you get people to read your article. If you have an opinion to share, you shouldn’t try to disguise it as a drab technical report. The article makes sound points and the title makes sense.

Compare “TCP Sucks” (easy to read—communicates, concisely, that this is an opinion piece, and what the opinion is)

or “Limitations of TCP” (misrepresents the article as informational)

[Animats]

The author says "TCP sucks", and is promoting his own protocol. Iridium. Which he hasn't even designed yet. That's a bit much. We don't get to criticize his approach.

(Also, if you're designing a communications system, don't give it the same name as another communications system.)

TCP has its limitations, of course. It was designed to work over a wide range of connections, including dial-up, and it does. It's suboptimal for broadband server to client connections where big server farms from a small number of vendors dominate. Hence QUIC and HTTP/2/3. Still, those don't provide a huge improvement in performance.[1] Even Google merely claims "on average, QUIC reduces Google search latency by 8% and 3.5% for desktop and mobile users respectively, and reduces video rebuffer time by 18% for desktop and 15.3% for mobile users." That's marginal. An ad blocker probably has more effect.

The author is worried about the overhead of the three-way handshake, but the overhead of setting up TLS is far worse.

[1] https://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2017/papers/imc17-final3...

[throw0101a]

> The author says "TCP sucks", and is promoting his own protocol. Iridium.

Well that won't be confusing at all:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio...

[alyrik]

> The author is worried about the overhead of the three-way handshake, but the overhead of setting up TLS is far worse.

Oh, "TLS sucks" is a whole separate blog post for another day ;-)

[bborud]

If the title had been “Limitations of TCP for X” I would be more likely to read it than with its current title. For the simple reason that 9 out of 10 times, when people say “TCP sucks” they ignore all the things we ask TCP to do. Not least of which is “try not to break the Internet”.

I’ve tried to design stream transports on top of UDP. It is doable if the scope is narrow and you actually understand a bit of what went into other protocols (like TCP). But it isn’t easy.

[varjag]

There is an unwritten rule that it is allowed to comment on clickbait articles without reading them.

[stestagg]

There is a hitherto-unwritten rule that it is allowed to comment...