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by korkybuchek 366 days ago
> socket.io is probably one of the most unnecessary libraries on this planet. Websockets are already as simple as possible.

Eh... While I agree that socket.io is one of those libraries you could probably "write" in an afternoon, and Websockets are simple, there are a couple of things that are kinda painful to rewrite time after time:

  - keepalives to detect dead sockets
  - reconnection logic with backoff
  - ability to switch to long-polling for weird environments
  - basic multiplexing/namespacing
2 comments

Websockets already have keepalives. Everything but long polling is doable in a few hours and can probably be one-shotted by an LLM. For long-polling, you can just drop down to Fetch calls.
This is true. Just a few days ago I had Claude one-shot some WebSocket utilities for reconnect and message queueing. It took 2 minutes.

I've written countless WebSocket wrappers in the past (similar aversion to socket.io as others in this thread). The one-shot output was perfect. Certainly better than my patience would've allowed.

Maybe socket.io is doing something fancy on the server side, but for clients, it's absolutely overkill.

Maybe you could save that one-shotted code into a library of some sort...?
And automatic json parsing of messages