[klabb3]

I just recently heavily refactored a lib [1] and looked a lot at two RFCs from 2013.

I don’t know how representative they are, but overall I got the impression that it’s a lot better than casual specs and academic papers, and good language. Another huge plus is that they don’t change every week, and are published publicly.

But at the same time, these ones were unnecessarily complex and with too few examples/pseudo-code, which leaves quite a bit of room ambiguity and implementation divergence.

I used to think RFCs were impenetrable and superhuman, but now I see it as a bit more mortal. If anything, I think simplicity is the best cure for interop issues – and that includes reducing the amount of knobs. Writing a spec in natural language is certainly a good exercise that can feed back into – and help simplify – the implementation as well.

[1]: https://github.com/betamos/zeroconf